What teacher doesn't need more storage?

Well, we are at it again! Nearly 200 teacher-bloggers have teamed up to bring you another round of BRIGHT IDEAS... no products, no freebies, just great ideas to help make your day to day teaching life easier!  You will be able to complete the hop from any blog, as it is a large circle, so there is no real beginning or end, or you may go to the inlinkz at the bottom of this page to check out where to hop next!

This year I came to a new school and a new district to become their 5th Kindergarten teacher! When I came into my classroom it was bare, 3 bookshelves, 2 tables and NO chairs! I wasn't too worried about gathering resources, my biggest question was where I was going to put all of these little bodies that were arriving in just a few days! We were able to find about 24 chairs, but still that wasn't going to be enough. It was enough for students to have a place to sit when working whole group, but not enough for my table or my assistant's table for small group instruction... So my bright idea is CRATE SEATS! 

Crate seats can be expensive to make, so I found short cuts any place I could without cutting the quality of the end result.

Materials to Gather:
1 -- crates
2 -- wood (I went to Lowes and spoke to someone about buying the right stuff, I bought a large piece of ply wood, and they cut it for me at no charge! The measurements you need are: 15 3/4 x 12 3/4)
3 -- cushion (To make this step cheaper, I used an egg crate that is typically put onto bed, I purchased the XL twin from Walmart)
4 -- cute fabric (Who knew fabric was so expensive?  I purchased a flat sheet bed set from Walmart, costs roughly $5, this won't make me feel as bad when I want to change them out year to year!)
5 -- staple gun
6 -- staples for staple gun

Optional
1 -- shower curtain (Teaching K, you just never know what is going to happen or the fluids you may come across, little did I know JUST HOW MUCH this would save my life this year!)

Step 1: gather all of your materials

Step 2: ASSEMBLE!

First, I took the egg crate as a whole and placed it over the cut board and used a marker to mark off where I needed to cut, then cut the egg crate.

Second, I placed the shower curtain over the cut egg crate, marked it and cut it -- you want to make sure this will go around to staple onto the back so that nothing can leak around it!

Third, I stapled the shower curtain into the board to hold the egg crate in place.

Fourth, I laid the bed sheet out onto the table.

Last, I marked off and cut the bed sheet to fit over the egg crate and the shower curtain and stapled it to the board.

Then, repeat!

Step 3: Sit, store, teach and enjoy!

Here is the finished product!  I made 12 of them and still had 2 or 3 pieces of the board left over, but 12 pretty much took up all of the bed sheets and the egg crate.

Classroom benefits of crate seats:
-- STORAGE!  I store everything from school supplies, reams of paper, seasonal books, changes of clothes, and teaching resources in these bins!   They hold so much and make for less clutter!

-- Perfect sized seats for little learners (Adults of many sizes have also sat on the crates in my room and they've held up wonderfully!)


-- Adds a pop of color to the classroom

Up next on the hop is Nicole from Teaching with Style!  She has some great fun guided reading warm up games to get your students ready to learn.  Just click her icon below to continue hopping, or you can scroll down to the inlinkz to hop around!

An InLinkz Link-up

An InLinkz Link-up