Flannel Friday: Storing Flannelboard Stuff

Well, I was a good worker bee and scheduled Flannel Friday posts for the last couple weeks to go up while I was on vacation, and now that I’m back, all this week I thought I had one scheduled for today as well.

Guess what? I didn’t! And it’s my day off and I can’t pull one together from home today, so this is my first Flannel Friday since January without a pattern or idea. *cue sad violin music*

However, I recently had a comment from a reader asking for storage ideas. So that’s today’s post: How do you store your flannelboards? How do you store and organize your sets and pieces? If you are a part of a larger system, do you share throughout the whole system, or does each branch have their own stash? If you share among branches, how does that work? Does anyone buy their own materials and make flannel sets on their own time, and thus consider their sets their own property, rather than the library’s? Do you store your pieces by rhyme, or do you store, say, sets of animals, and then pull out from different envelopes the ones that you need that day?

At my library, flannel sets have been stored in 10 x 13 manila envelopes, with the name of the flannel (and if it is magnetic, felt, etc) on the long edge. (I will take photos and add to this post soon.) These envelopes are set into a four-drawer file cabinet in alphabetical order, so you can riffle through the top edges in each drawer to find the one you want. There’s a typed list in a Word doc, but nothing fancy for indexing or searching.

Recently, the department has invested in some of those translucent poly envelopes, which are even better: you can see at a glance what the pieces look like and if it’s the set you’re looking for. Plus they’re more durable and less inclined to tear than the manila ones.

What do you guys do?

Share a comment with your thoughts, or write a post on your own blog (with photos!) and share the link, and I’ll write up a compilation post!

PS! The Round Up is at the amazing Andrea’s place today! Check out all the ideas atRovingfiddlehead Kidlit. It’s already up, but you can send her links throughout the day and she will add to the post. Yahoo!