Back To School Purging

Yes I am back in my room the week before we are officially supposed to go back.  It was nice to chit chat with the office staff and catch up before I headed into my room.  The whole school is being rewired to support more technology so the campus has been off limits all summer.

I got into my room and it was nice and clean, but no electricity.

Luckily I have lots of windows

 I got to work rearranging the furniture which actually didn't take that long.

Then I changed out my bulletin board borders and decided to get to work on my math manipulatives.

This summer I have been reading Math Work Stations by Debbie Diller.

Her first few chapters are about organizing and purging.  So I pulled out all of my tubs and containers.

Doesn't look so bad, except for those huge containers from Go Math!  I have not had any place to store those and have just been shoving them under tables to get them out of the way.

 I decided to start with the base 10 blocks.  I have two sets and I really didn't use both of the sets.  I actually didn't use the yellow set at all last year.  The green set from the Go Math tub are foam and not as noisy.  There are also enough for each student to have their own set.

 There are way too many pieces though.  I decided to break apart the sets and make it more convenient for my needs.  I placed 5 hundreds 20 tens and 20 ones in each bag.

 I made 25 sets and placed them in one of the smaller tubs.

It almost fits!  I put the rest in the huge tub it was in.

Then I just started opening boxes and purging items I had never even seen!! Yikes!  Do you know how many plastic clocks I found that I have never even opened?

I also found all these goodies from Everyday Math that I have not even opened after 9 years!!

Now this is all I have left to go through and organize.

I think I may need to just pick up a few more tubs like the smaller ones above to house the rest of my items.

I can't believe how much junk I have accumulated over the years and how many things I have never even used.  I thank Debbie Diller for making me clean out and get rid of wasted items.  Hopefully a newer teacher might take some of my overflow.  Otherwise I don't know what to do with it. I have such a hard time throwing things away!  What would you do?