Teacher Week - Sanity Savers

Next up for Teacher Week over at Blog Hoppin' focus on what keeps us SANE throughout the year.  For me, this was easy! Below you will find four things that I use/used on a daily basis.

 Do I even need to explain?

 You may get tired of hearing about these beautiful little bottles of oils, but they are GAME CHANGERS!  Kiddos giving you a headache; rub a little Thieves behind your ears and on the back of your neck. Want your kiddos to be a bit more calm? Diffuse Lavender in your classroom.  Need to clean your desk from all those nasty germs, but despise the smell of cleaners? Spray some thieves (and a little lemon for tougher germs) and clean away!

I start every day with a little Stress Away and Joy on my wrists.

Love these little bottles of beauty!

 I had to learn the hard way. Thankfully it was only my third year teaching and I didn't have quite the large files I have now!

If you spend your money on nothing else...get an external hard drive.  

I back up everything. Anything I create for school, my clip art, important forms, etc... I take it with me everywhere, can plug it into any computer and bring up whatever I need.
It's the best investment in my opinion!

If you have not heard of GoNoodle by now then you may just be living under a rock.  Living in Florida, the weather is very unpredictable and ever-changing. You can head to school in the morning wearing clothes for a hot, sunny day and an hour later you need a rain jacket, umbrella, rain boots and a canoe and paddle! For these days, we use GoNoodle as our indoor recess. 

We love GoNoodle for brain breaks! Teaching 5 and 6 year olds requires lots of moving around and GoNoodle totally takes care of that in a super fun way that has every kid engaged! Love me some GoNoodle!

Get them wiggles out!!!!

I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of really good ones, but I'll leave that for the rest of the amazing educators who are joining in on Teacher Week to share their ideas.

Click below and save your sanity!!

Teaching Tip {linky}

I love Hadar from Miss Kindergarten.  She is one of the sweetest bloggers and is amazingly talented!

She decided to start a fun little linky party all on teaching tips.

I must say...I've read SEVERAL blogs {found some new ones too} and now have a L-O-N-G list of "must-dos!"  

Even if you don't link up...you MUST go check out these blogs.  Lots of good stuff.  Isn't that why we're all part of this blogging community anyways?! :)

Okay.  Let me preface some things before I give you my teaching tip. I am slightly OCD.  My mother gracious gave me some of that gene amongst others! ;)  I get massive OCD when it comes to organizing.  I like things to be broken down every which way.  For instance my "files"... like "worksheet files."  They are not just broken down by theme...no, no, no...they are broken down by theme, then by subject, then by common core standard, then by level of difficulty.  Oh yes!  These are all nicely filed into page protectors and placed in two large binders (I actually am in need of a third binder now).  The binders are also organized by months/semester.  Makes finding things SUPER easy.

That's just the background heads up to my teaching tip!

My teaching tip is simple.  LABEL.  Label EVERYTHING!  Label things for YOUR sanity and label things for your students.  I might be making mine slightly OCD, but hey, everything's where I want it to be. We have a drawer for our Marvelous Monday writing folders, a drawer for our monthly journals, and a drawer for our writing folders {where we keep our on going writing for writer's workshop}.  We also have every.single. math manipulative in it's own little box.  

The kiddos are able to find and place everything where it belongs.  

Talk about saving time!

One area of my room that I LOVE is my classroom library {as seen above...another tip, turn your old cubbies that you don't really use into a library...Dollar Tree baskets}.  It's labeled and organized to the max.  My kiddos are able to go book shopping ALONE.  Yes, I let my kinder babies go book shopping ALONE.  Why?!  Because everything is labeled and they can easily find where everything goes.

Each and EVERY.SINGLE book has it's own label that matches the basket it belongs in.  I taught them {and we practiced A.LOT} where to find the sticker and where to find it on the basket.  Viola!  Sanity! 

I created these labels two years ago, updated them slightly a couple months ago, and have them in my TPT store for a whopping $4!!! 

I am in the process of adding more labels for a sweet fellow blogger.

While you're there check out my new packet!  Read more about it HERE!

Don't forget to link up and/or begin your long lists of must-dos after reading these fantastic tips!

Happy Veteran's Day weekend!!