I have been busy these last several weeks reorganizing our classroom to prepare for our upcoming homeschool year. It's quite a task and sometimes overwhelming for me to decide what I will keep and what I can get rid of as far as academic resources go. We are recycling tons of old papers, magazines, and used workbooks and this morning I had a yard sale to get rid of some things. I sold some educational material, but mostly I had baby girl clothes for sale that my youngest cupcake has grown out of. It was a hot day, but I am happy to say that I got rid of ALL my baby clothes and shoes thanks to a sweet young mother who came to the sale. She has relatives and friends who live in Mexico and she teared up when she was telling me that there is so much poverty in Mexico so she has decided to collect children's clothing and she is personally delivering the collection to those families who need so much. She drove away with 3 garbage bags of clothes as I told her to take all that was left to help with her ministry to help those in need. Win-win situation for everyone! Besides decluttering, I am also reorganizing our classroom and I'm always looking for ways to store math manipulatives better. I love collecting empty containers and storing them until I find the right "stuff" to fill them. Since my youngest cupcake was a baby, I have held on to those cute Gerber plastic baby food containers thinking they are just too durable to throw away. They remind me of "mini" Rubbermaid/Sterilite boxes like those used in Sue Patrick's Workbox System and since baby food can be expensive, I was determined to find another use for the boxes besides filling up the trash can with them. So I have decided to store all my real coins in the boxes to make them easy to get to when we do money lessons in our homeschool day. I have several paper punch out coins from my days of teaching elementary school so I taped the "head" of each paper coin on top of the lid and the "tail" side on the front for the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. From the pictures below you can see that I have also reused the plastic seasoning containers to store all the paper punch out coins. I used to store them in ziplock bags, but packing and unpacking ziplock bags does not make for quick cleanup or easy storage sometimes in my house and everything ended up on the floor. Cleaning up coins after an activity is easy now and makes for a great sorting lesson when my cupcakes place each type of coin in the right place. So are there other "Gerber geeks" out there who like and reuse these baby food containers in some way to store things? If so, I would love to hear what you put in them!