High School Room Progress...

I've probably spent about a total of 12 hours organizing this room so far, and I am happy to say progress has been made!  I probably have half of the cabinets organized and consolidated, or at least emptied out to store other stuff.  I wish I would have remembered my camera or phone yesterday when I worked in there because you wouldn't believe the amount of construction paper I unloaded from the tall double cabinet and four short cabinets...it seemed unbelievable to me!  I don't use that amount of construction paper in my elementary room!  Either way, I kept some paper supplies and donated the rest to the school overflow room.  I have cleaned out and gotten rid of all of the extra furniture that I don't want and hopefully by the end of the week, the custodians will have the floor stripped and waxed.  I plan on moving my pottery wheels from the elementary room down to the high school room to create a pottery nook.

As I'm organizing, I'm thinking about maternity leave in November/December/January and all of these supplies that my substitute is going to have to deal with.  I am thinking of locking cabinets during my leave and only leaving ones open that she/he will need access to for supplies...which brings me to a question...do you label your cupboards on the outside?  I'm thinking about putting labels on the cupboards so it will be easier for the sub to navigate, but I don't want to make it easier for other teachers to convince the sub while I'm gone that they need supplies.  The only reason I worry about this is because teachers have been trying to scavenge supplies out of this room since the end of the school year when they found out the other teacher was retiring (as if they had to worry...I feel like I'm giving up and donating plenty of supplies!)  My other option I thought about was drawing a little diagram of the room cabinets and labeling everything in the diagram in my sub binder, but it seems more work intensive.  

This cabinet was full of yarn, yarn and more yarn!  I gave two boxes away, put there boxes down in the overflow room, and kept half a shelf and the boxed yarn that is new.  This is going to be my fiber crafts cabinet (and cellophane...lol).  I'm not too into fiber crafts but the time may come that I would want to do some basking weaving or something with the students, so I'm keeping this small stash of supplies.

This cabinet was FULL of construction paper.  I have turned it into the paper supply cabinet.  The top shelf has a small assortment of multi-colored construction paper and black construction paper (for framing artwork in case I run out of mat board).  The second shelf has white, manila and colored tag board.  The third shelf has tracing paper, manila drawing paper and the half used sketchbooks that will be used to supply white drawing paper when needed.  Fourth shelf contains watercolor paper, block printing paper, graph paper and art paper.  Bottom two shelves have the large drawing paper/tagboard/construction paper, watercolor paper and then some random packages of other art paper.  I have labeled each shelf with a piece of masking tape.

These two shelves also contained construction paper.  Now, the cupboard on the left is the sketchbook overflow cabinet and the cabinet on the right will hold art games and activities.

Again, this shelf had construction paper...now it houses the art VHS tapes and reference/resource books.

You can see the four cabinets that were in the room are cleaned out and gone!

The back nooks have been organized...The top middle one will hold the glaze that I ordered for this year.  Bottom right is for stained glass and the top right will be for all the canvas boards I ordered.  Middle right contains linoblocks.  Middle and top left contain 1/2 gallons of acrylic.  Bottom left contains Masonite board and the middle bottom has lots of clay boards.  The rest of the cabinets in the back of the room haven't been touched yet...

Aside from the cupboards I pointed out, there were four other short cabinets that had shelves full of construction paper...I kid you now, when I stacked everything that I didn't want on the tables, it was probably a 5'x5'x5' stack!