Day In the Classroom
Reflecting on the every day happenings in our fourth grade classroom; including the triumphs, the drama, the tragedy, and especially the comedy and joy!
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Organizing My Classroom Library
One of my projects for this summer was to sort and reorganize my classroom library. After 24 years, I have accumulated a lot of books, in fact there are almost too many choices. For several years my books have been sorted according to genre. They were displayed in baskets, and labeled with the genre. We talked a lot about book genres, but kids had a lot of trouble getting books back in the appropriate place. Many didn’t even make an effort. In other words, our classroom library was pretty much a mess.
Displaying books in tubs and baskets takes up a lot of space, so two years ago I decided to store about a third of my collection and rotate the books, so different books would be displayed throughout the year. This did not work very well. I had three large tubs of books that never even saw the light of day last year.
This year I am putting all the books on shelves, installing curtains on the book cases, and displaying tubs of books on top to choose from. Instead of sorting by genre, I have divided books into fiction or non-fiction. Hopefully this will help people get books back where they belong. I also made myself weed out some of the old books. In fact I threw out a whole trash can full of books that I know were at least 20 years old. I have a really hard time doing that, and I know that I need to weed out more yet. Here are the books after they have been organized on the shelves.
My plan is to have our class librarians, which is one of my classroom jobs, select new books to be displayed every two weeks.
I hadn’t done any sewing in a very long time, but I broke out the sewing machine last week. I just made a simple curtain panel and installed them with tension curtain rods. It was pretty easy. Here is our library with the curtains installed.
Books that I check out from the school library or the Area Education Association library will be displayed at the front of the room in this teal blue book shelf. I usually do this for special units of study and our Core Knowledge topics. I have a box of books ordered for our study of mountains and our science unit on rocks and mineral. I also have an additional bookshelf for reference books.
With these changes, I hope that I can provide lots of choices to suit the tastes of all my readers. I hope I can also cut down on some of the nonproductive ”browsing” that some students do. The library is sometimes a meeting place, but not much reading goes on. And of course, I’m hoping to keep things better organized. I’ll let you know how it goes.
How do you organize your classroom library? If this doesn’t work, I’ll be looking for new ideas.
7 Responses to “Organizing My Classroom Library”
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August 16th, 2011 at 8:57 pm
Looks like a great idea. I’m trying to store my English books during my French block of the year. If I’m unable to store my books in another classroom, I may use your curtain idea in your classroom.
August 17th, 2011 at 5:05 am
I like you have a lot of books and had to make some tough choices about my classroom library this year. I sorted through my books and pulled out any books provided by the district and gave them to a new teacher in my wing to help her build her library. Then I pulled out the books that my grade never reads and passed them onto my sister who teaches a higher grade level. This made it possible for me to now display all of my books on shelves.
I have two additional suggestions for managing the library once the students enter the room. I had the problem of children lollygagging in the library as well as them making frequent visits to it without ever finishing a book which turned it into the meeting place.
I have the children choose a book shopping day (M-F). This then becomes their day each week to browse and borrow books. I create a chart that serves as a reminder for them as to when their book shopping day. In addition, I have them write it on their notebook. This limits the number of people in the library to four or five on any given day. They have three opportunities to shop each day that do not interfere with instruction time: arrival, quiet/snack time, and dismissal.
The other thing I do is I use clothespins for signing out books. I have a fiction, nonfiction, audio, and math library. They get two pins for each the fiction and nonfiction library, and one each for the audio and math library. This serves as a way for them to take out enough books for the week as well as ensuring that they are reading a variety of genres.
The clothespins also help the children remember which basket they borrowed the books from. The pins have their names on them abd are color coded to match the color of the library: fiction is yellow so their name is written in brown & nonfiction is blue so their name is written in blue. When borrowing they put a pin on the tag that labels the basket. When returning they find their pin, return the books, and then take the pin off so that they can choose another book.
Sometimes they state that they can’t find their pin, which can be possible, but they are required to do a thorough search before I will create another one for them. Sometimes I have to reteach this routine for a few of them, and I am finding that I have less books being misplaced. This year I found only five mishelved books in 50 baskets of books!
August 17th, 2011 at 8:36 am
I really like your idea about shopping days. I’m definitely going to give that a try. I also need to do additional weeding and plan to do that throughout the year. I have more to throw out, because if it’s from a teacher that left 20 years ago, and it’s still in one piece, nobody is reading it. I really appreciate the ideas. Thanks!
August 17th, 2011 at 5:57 pm
I spent the last two days from 8-4 organizing my classroom and getting it ready. I really felt good about it. I realize now, after reading your post, that my classroom library is a mess. I have books in tubs in a willy-nilly fashion. I was hoping that my students could help me sort through it. In retrospect that might not be the best choice.
I too, love the shopping days….that paired with visits to the media will keep their book boxes filled. (Now I just need to find the book boxes).
Love your curtains too….sometimes our rooms are just visually overwhelming and I think the curtains will help with that. (I have enlisted the help of my secretary who sews…when I asked her today she said…”Oh, the curtains again”. It seems I’ve asked her 3 years in a row and haven’t done it yet.
Love reading your Blog as I get so many ideas.
Thanks for sharing!
August 20th, 2011 at 10:27 am
Wow, I just went through the same process this August! I was getting really frustrated with students not making an effort to put books back in the right spots, but I also acknowledged that I hadn’t created a system that made that easy for them. I was also frustrated with the amount of time being spent browsing and not reading.
This year, I continued to organize my books by genre, except for a couple of special baskets that are organized by author or series. The baskets themselves are labeled, and I also put a corresponding label inside the front cover of the book. That way, the students can easily figure out where to put the book away at. I also have library helpers as a classroom job, and I will make sure they are frequently checking for improperly placed books.
To avoid the browsing issue, I created a “book box” for each student. They are housed on shelves in one of my big closets. The students may browse for books at the beginning or end of the day, and their job is to always have three chapter books in their book box. That way, when it is time to READ, they should always have three options available to pick up and jump into. While I don’t want to discourage kids from browsing and making thoughtful choices about books, the reluctant readers were using browsing as their way of getting out of reading.
Thanks for sharing your ideas! I could really relate, and from your post and the comments, I think I can really make this new system work!
September 4th, 2011 at 10:49 pm
Friday was the first day that my class librarians selected books for the class. I was so pleased with the job they did. They seemed to enjoy going through the collection, choosing books, and then switching the books in the tubs. Let’s hope that things continue to go as smoothly. So far so good, but we are going to move to shopping days as Tracy suggested.
December 5th, 2011 at 9:05 pm
I sort my chapter books by fountas and pinnell reading levels so kids read at their instructional level I then have one set of shelves for nonfiction- lots of picture books and guiness wOrld records. Other set of shelves is fiction picture books. Unfortunately just not enough time to sit and read, especially when gr4 need chapter books. I also invite kids to borrow books at home but they don’t usually take me up on it.