How to Organize Your Small Group Literacy Materials

I recently heard an organizational expert (or at least someone on Instagram with an exceptionally organized house) say that to keep something organized, everything needs to have a designated space.

This got me thinking about our intervention rooms. Our goal for the year was to organize all of our materials and we’ve been making good progress! One of the spaces that has felt the most successful has been our small group tables. So, we thought we’d share our organizational system with you!

First things first -

The first step in organizing our small group materials was getting our space ready.

When working with small groups, we have our small group table set up in the corner. This way, we have easy access to the whiteboard (as seen on the left of the picture) and our anchor charts (as seen behind the chair in the picture).

We like using a kidney table (also called a horseshoe table or small group table) because it allows us to sit across from our students and see all of their work at once.

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This table, however, does not offer storage. We keep students’ books on bookshelves in our office so that they don’t forget to bring them. Then, they can take their homework folder (the orange folder in the picture) home with them and bring it back each day/week. This process works great for books, but we knew that in order to get (and stay!) organized, we needed something to store all of our high-use materials in or on. We landed on >>>this roller cart<<< from Amazon. It has customizable hooks, cups, and dividers which helped us make it a fit for us and our students. Plus, the fact that it’s on wheels is a game-changer. It makes it so incredibly easy to wheel into another intervention room or even just around the table and closer to students.

Once we got the cart, the next step was to organize each shelf.

Top Shelf & Cup Holders:

On the top shelf, we hang cups with pencils, markers, highlighters, and dry-erase markers. These cups are removable so we can easily grab them and pass them around the table for students to grab from.

Then, we use the customizable dividers for other “quick-grab” materials and items we use in every session. We’ll have a compartment for stamps/markers, another for fidgets, a third for erasers, another for manipulatives, and so on.

In the two largest compartments, we’ll place our PA drill cards and phonogram sound drill cards.

>>>These PA drill cards<<< have a 10-part drill for each phonogram & phonics pattern that we work on with students. We use it in every lesson as a quick warm-up, which means we need to have it close by and easy to grab.

The sound drill is another activity we complete in every lesson to help strengthen students’ sound-symbol knowledge and warm up their brains before their reading tasks. We use binder clips to separate >>>these sound drill cards<<< out by level so they align with our scope & sequence.

Middle Shelf:

On the middle shelf, we like to keep our whiteboard, >>>these grapheme magnets,<<< and glitter paper.

Students can use the whiteboard when spelling, as a base to build words with the magnetized grapheme magnets, etc. The glitter paper is great for adding multisensory instruction without any mess (the day we got to say goodbye to the messy sand trays and shaving cream residue was a good one).

Bottom Shelf:

The bottom shelf of the cart houses our games! We like using games as a review in each of our lessons and as a way to help keep students engaged. You can play them as they are intended to target decoding, or, you can pull cards for spelling words, have students define the words on the cards, for writing activities, and so much more.

That’s it! All of our small group necessities are organized in one place.

If you are curious about the Science of Reading and organizing your lessons, check out the SOR Blueprint below!