4 Ways to Use Rainbow Storage Bins

 If having too many rainbow storage bins is wrong, I don’t want to be right!  When they go on sale, I buy them whether I need them or not.  I currently have 4 fully stocked rainbow storage bins full of independent activities for students and 3 fully stocked clear storage bins.  I will share my 4 favorite ways you can get yourself organized using your rainbow storage bins! 

1. Label Everything

I hate wasting instructional time or my planning time!  I was finding that it was taking too much time to look through my rainbow bins for the needed activities, and it was driving me crazy.  I tried a few different organizational systems, but nothing seemed to work. 

Enter Lisa Hollady from Chalkboard Superhero.  We met at an Extended School Year program, and I was in awe of how beautifully organized her rainbow storage bins were.  Her secret?  This freebie is from her store! An organizational game-changer for sure!

2. Poke Cards

Poke cards are my go-to activity when I need students to work independently so I can give assessments.  Added bonus - the kids love them, too, and they fit perfectly in my rainbow bins!  

Poke cards are easy to use and self-checking! Students look at the front of the card and determine their answer.  They use a tool to poke their response (coffee stirrers are our favorites) and then turn it over to check their answer.  If they are correct, the hole will be colored; if they are incorrect, they turn the card over and try again.

I have poke cards covering a variety of skills, that I have two bins dedicated to them.  Now that they are organized, I can set them out, and the students can easily choose the set they want to do and put things back in the right place.

If you want to learn more about poke cards, you can check out this post.

3. Flash Cards

Our school uses Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA). CKLA is a unique core curriculum for PreK–5 ELA grounded in the science of reading and research-based foundational skills instruction. 

I have flashcards galore to match each skills unit.  I use them to practice fluency, automaticity, and decoding. Kindergarten alone has 8 units of sequential phonics instruction, so I must have the cards organized and ready to go when needed!

I recently wrote about 5 ways I use flashcards in my reading groups and independent centers. The post includes a link to 318 pages of FREE flashcards. You can click here to check that out!

4. Manipulative Storage

Manipulatives are helpful tools when working on phonological awareness. I use them for blending, segmenting, adding, deleting, adding, deleting, and manipulating words/sounds.

How else do you use your rainbow bin storage? Let me know in the comments!

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