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.