While cleaning my stockroom at the end of this school year, I found an immense amount of materials that I could have used if I had known they were here. If you’re starting a new teaching assignment, or if you’ve never looked through everything in your stockroom, take a day and do it. You can’t count on your colleagues to know where everything is unless they’ve gone through the supplies recently. I spent a huge amount of unnecessary time and money to find materials and supplies that we already had. It’s worth the time investment to find out what’s in there.