Organizing Math Games

Hi Everyone!

As a teacher I have so much stuff that at times I feel like a hoarder (can you relate?!). My team and I always joke that the show "hoarders" needs to feature classrooms because it is amazing how much stuff we can creatively cram in our rooms!  We are teachers, we are resourceful, and we save everything!  We can come up with 1 hundreds reasons to keep 200 coffee filters, a bag of broken crayons, or even a 10 pound bag of rice! 

Anyway, one problem I kept running into my first year was that I had so many great resources scattered all over the place, that I had trouble remembering to pull them out when I needed them!  Since then I have spent a lot of time organizing and rearranging my room.  It is has really helped maximize the use of my materials, especially in math.  I had so many wonderful games I’ve made and purchased from TpT that I didn’t even use my first year!  They sat filed in a filing cabinet (my first attempt at being organized) and were rarely being used all year!  So sad!

Here’s what I did to become more organized---

I realized that our math series (Go Math!) has 9 key chapters.  So I bought an inexpensive 9 cube shelf from target and 9 cute (durable!) bins to go in it.   I put numbers (1-9) on each bin and organized all of my math games by chapter.   Now after the kids finish their worksheets in chapter 8, they choose a math game from bin 8 and this provides reinforcement of the skills featured in their worksheets that day. 

It works great.  Best of all, this system allows the previous chapters math games to stay available all year!  The kids love playing games from previous chapters, which allows them to constantly spiral down and practice skills from earlier in the year.  All of my kids scored at the highest level on their math standardized test last year and I really credit this to the fact that they were constantly revisiting all skills all year! 

Numbers are velcroed on (hence why some are crooked atm!)

Bin 8 is all comparing and ordering games! 

My math skill packs are available here.

So there is have it! That is how I organize my math games!  How do you keep track of yours??