Monthly Themed Binder Covers

This is my first official "preschool" post to kick off this new chapter in our lives.

Step 1 of starting preschool at home - GET ORGANIZED!
After a week spent finding and downloading material for our lessons I quickly became overwhelmed when I started to print just the first 2 weeks out! I needed a better game plan.

After researching how other moms organized their material I decided to go with the binder method. It's cheap, easy to organize, and has quick access. I decided to do my binders by month since there are so many different categories of material to be covered {like themed holidays, reading, math, tracing, coloring, cutting, sorting, sequencing, ....}. The only categories that I wanted to keep separate and not "assign" a month were the Bible lessons and Spanish.

So I bought 14 of the economy {cheap} 1" binders from Target. I also bought 4 packs of 100 sheet protectors at Target since they were the cheapest. I divided the sheet protectors up between the binders and I can already tell you I probably need another pack or two of them.

Today I ordered 14 Big Tab Insertable Dividers, 8-Tab

I only ordered because our local Office Depot didn't have 14 of anything! I will organize the 8 tabs as follows although may not be in this exact order:

1. Letter (Emma will have letters of the month and Reese will start sight words with those same letters *this will start in September since June-August are review months)
2. Number (the numbers for the month for each Reese & Emma)
3. Shape (shape of the month worksheets)
4. Opposites (they will have an opposite concept of the month)
5. Nursery Rhyme (1 nursery rhyme per month activities)
6. Theme (monthly themed lesson work organized by weeks for each girl)
7. Books (activities for the books that will be read that month based on the theme)
8. Holiday (activities for any holiday that month)

I made monthly themed binder covers & spine labels to organize all the preschool work I have planned.

They are each a different color and we will focus on that color for the month. Again, June-August are review months so I used more advanced colors for these covers since it doesn't really matter. 

I even made covers & spines for a Bible binder and a Spanish binder!

I mostly followed this tutorial  for making the covers but decided not to make my spines transparent and instead added a doodle frame to the spine to help make reading the words easier. This was A LOT of work and time spent making these but I fell so much more organized!

I can easily look at the cover of a binder and know what the color of the month is, the theme & holidays (although I didn't put every holiday on them). Easter rotates between March and April so I left it off the covers.

I'm thinking of selling these but first need to figure out all the logistics of the images I used.