Please people, when you depart a job.. clean out your old desk before the new person takes the job....

This is 'exactly' how the desk drawers were left for me. I had to do so much 'organizing/sorting' of the art supplies in my new classroom-- that I didn't have time to do anything about the junky 'tornado destruction looking' messy drawers until just now. Ok, the truth is- the mess in the drawers gave me the 'heebie jeebies'...
The first two photos are actual photos of the drawers as they were found.

In the first photo are the keys to the storage cabinets- I didn't know that they were there for a week, because I couldn't SEE THEM! It's almost like one of those children's books where you have to find the 'items' on the page.


This is the entire contents of 2 small desk drawers and that 'thin flat' center drawer- that is too small to store much of anything:




This is how it looked after working on the sorting for almost 3 hours.



After all the sorting there was some TRASH....


My way of organizing my classrooms is simple: just putting like things together so- I'd know what I had for art materials/etc. I'm not a type A personality by any means-- but, I do know it's best to keep all the painting, printing, etc. materials in the same area/etc.

Interesting facts:
I found 128 ink pens, 18 pairs of scissors, an expired student ID, 2 combs, mystery keys and two padlocks, too many markers to count, (I just put them in the student marker box), and an endless array of duplicated office and art supplies. Of course, if you don't keep 'similiar' things together--- it would make it difficult to realize that you have already have plenty of scissors in the desk drawer.


I also found a wide assortment of 'art supplies' in the three desk drawers and I put them in the appropriate locations where other similiar art materials were stored.