Organizing my binder for this class.

My first class was last night.  It was scary, exciting, enlightening, and interesting.  It's a small class, with four female students and a female instructor.  The instructor gave us some documents to print, and I skipped over to my parents to print the documents out.  I ended up with this:

Many noble trees died in printing this.  
Yeah, that's a lot of paper.  188 pages in the big pile. That also did not show my handouts from class.  All of it necessary for my class.  I realized last night, but confirmed today, that with this much potential paper, that I would need a binder and to figure out a way to organize it, since a lot of this is reference materials.

I went home and dug found my binder that I knew would work for this. I figured out how to organize it so that it would be practical for class.  I got out my whole punch, took the tabs I had in the binder and labeled them with pencil: lecture, HW (for homework), Mixed Review, and Final Exam Review.  Eventually I ended up with what you see in the picture.  I will explain why I sub-sectioned the red section, although you can barely make them out in this photo, down below. 

Does re-using an old binder make up for the paper? 
 The blue tab is where the lecture packet lives.  The red section is where the homework section is.  The yellow is the Mixed Review section and the orange tab is where the Final Exam review information lives.  I have an empty green tab in the binder as well, in case I get more information I have to keep in my binder.  I was really sad to learn that they no longer make the Five Star XL binder anymore.  The layout is prefect for how I use it, and I wanted to pick up another one for my next core when I am taking two classes. 

What I love about this binder is the large pocket in front that can hold a spiral notebook.  I do all of math work written out in a spiral notebook. With this large pocket, I can put my math notebook and scientific calculator in.  It also has a zip pocket that holds my pencil, extra lead, eraser, and sticky notes. (Yes, they are not in the pouch for this picture.) I am currently hunting for another binder that has a pocket that can fit a spiral notebook in.  So far, I have not seen anything that has a similar feature.  Then again, I have time before I actually might need two notebooks.  So the hunt can continue at least till the end of October, when I actually will have two classes to work with it.


Now the HW section covers all eight weeks of classes. It was the part that was 188 pages long.   We have 2 HW assignments per week on average, in addition to supplemental work from out text books. I used sticky note strips to divide the HW information into the section it would be.  For example, WK 2 for the first homework of week two, and WK 2.2 for the second part of week two's homework. Now, I have a ton of sticky pads around, so I use them, but if I wanted to be fancy, I could have gotten the "page marker tabs" to do this with.  However, I am frugal, I had these around, and actually put a pad of these in the binder so I could "tab on top" the things I need to review further and continue to practice.  Now you can see that I actually label the bottom of the page with the first homework of the week, and the second homework's tab is on top.  I do this so that way I can see the other main tabs in the binder.  They are blocking out the currently empty tab. in the last section.   So that's not a big issue.

So that's how I have organized my binder.  How do you organize yours?

Later ~
Jen



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