How I Organize Reading the Alphabet

I am asked quite often how I organize Reading the Alphabet. And it’s a great question. After all, there are 1400+ pages in the bundle pack! That number alone can be overwhelming. Now mix that in with all the emergent readers, handwriting pages, sight word activities, and other printables and you might just get dizzy. 🙂

I’ve talked a little bit here and there about how I organize things, like our handwriting notebooks and our homeschool classroom, but I’ve never come out and posted directly on how I organize this 1400+ page curriculum for beginning readers. Today, I want to tackle that answer as best I can.

*This post contains affiliate links.

 

How I Organize Reading the Alphabet

Organizing the Files

The first way I organize Reading the Alphabet is on my computer. This might seem obvious, but all six files from the bundle pack are saved in one folder that I can easily access. This alone saves me a lot of time from searching through my many files to find what I need.

 

Organizing the Lesson Plans

Even though the lessons come with lessons “plans”, I don’t follow them exactly. With that being said, I do not print out every activity for every lesson. {So those of you who ask me how much it costs to print the entire curriculum, I simply don’t know. I don’t print it all.}

A sign of a good curriculum is that you have wiggle room to adjust it, modify it, and adapt it to fit your student’s/students’ needs! I’m always thrilled to see someone post an image on Instagram or their blog of their child doing an activity from Reading the Alphabet a completely different way.

Some weeks, my Kindergartner {who is finishing up RTA in a few weeks} has struggled to recognize the sight word, so we’ll take a little longer. On these weeks, I print out more of the activities to stretch it out a bit more for her.

On other weeks, she recognizes the sight word right away. So I know that I can condense the lessons into two or three days. On these weeks, I pick her favorite activities out of the lesson and we only do those.

Also note that many of the activities come in color and black and white. My daughter LOVES to color, so I rarely print off the colored readers or number pages, which saves me some money on ink!

 

Organizing Printables and Activities

Here are some of the practical way I manage all the printables:

 

1. Handwriting Notebook – We have a handwriting notebook {a 1.5″, 3-ring binder with plastic sleeve protectors} that keeps our handwriting pages {a subscriber freebie!}, the tracer pages, and some of the alphabet pages from 1+1+1=1. When we started, I printed them all out and organized them by ABC order to make them easy to find. {Read more about our handwriting notebooks.}

 

2. Reading bin– All her past emergent readers go in an independent reading bin. She is welcome to go back and re-read them any time and she does quite often. All current emergent readers stay at her desk until we’re finished with them.

 

3. Flip “Book”– The sight word mazes and puzzles are kept in a flip “book” of sorts on her desk. All the pages are slipped into plastic sleeve protectors and linked together with a ring. The plastic sleeve protectors make these pages re-usable! I often find her at her desk working them at various times during the day. {Note: I originally had them in her handwriting notebook, but it made it too bulky.}

 

4. Small File Box– I have a rickety file box and ABC dividers, like these, from my classroom teaching days that I use to store the picture cards, syllable cards, and pocket chart words.

 

5. Large File Box – Sometimes you just have odds and ends that don’t fit anywhere else at the time, so I keep a larger file box where I put those. These items are awaiting a better place to go…when I figure that out!

 

6. Trash Can– I simply don’t keep everything we do. I display her work above her desk, but when we work on a new activity that can be pinned above her desk, I throw the older one away.

 

So, that’s a little bit about how I organize Reading the Alphabet. It’s not magic. My way might not be the best for you. But at least you can get a few ideas of how all of it is managed.

 

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Want to purchase Reading the Alphabet for your child?

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Enjoy!
~Becky