I had initially started off with a small library that was organized by topics. I would introduce books to my kindergarteners as we discussed topics in the subject areas. This made sense to me, as most of my kindergarteners couldn't read independently.
Once I moved to another school, I found myself learning how to be a reading teacher. I didn't have a classroom of my own, but helped teachers implement guided reading into their classroom structure. I didn't have to worry about a classroom library, but had two guided reading libraries to stay on top of for two buildings. This was easy. We organized them by level, since teachers needed to easily come in and grab sets of books to use with their reading groups.
Once I had a classroom of my own, I thought that leveling my library was the way to go. I took the time to painstakingly look up every title on www.lexile.com. I wrote the level in the inside cover of the book, and sorted all the books by level. Next, I labeled the outside cover of the book with a bin number and taught my students to look for the matching numbers to reserve their selections. (They still didn't do it correctly!)
This past year, I would be asked by students where a certain title could be found, and I couldn't answer them. This part frustrated me the most.
I researched online, and read what other classroom library organization teachers would use. It seemed that I was making my library teacher friendly, but not student friendly.
This summer I have been working on my library. I found this great labeling system that matched the colors in my room on Teacher Pay Teacher. *add link here*
I began by removing all books from my shelves and organizing them into three categories: fiction, non-fiction and poetry. This was an eye opener as to what types of books I obviously favored when ordering books for my library. Once the books were sorted, I attacked each stack. Books that I had more than two of, I kept two and discarded the rest. Books that were old or damaged got junked. And each stack was further organized by categories (Fiction: traditional, realistic, mystery, science, fantasy. Non-Fiction: informational, autobiography, biography)
The categories were boxed up together using my book bins that I purchased from Dollar General. Now I have an idea about how many labels to make in each category.
Each book will have a label coordinating to the genre that it is associated with. I used Avery Address Labels (60 per sheet) and ran labels for the cover of each book.
I are ally hoping that this will work better for the students to find materials that they are interested in. There is still a lexile level in the cover of each book, but I often find that interest is what turns a child on to a book, not so much the level of the book.
To help me keep track of the books in my classroom, I plan to use the Book Retreiver app on my iPad. Students will be able to check books out from my classroom, but I'll know who has the and who still needs to turn in books to me. (I have found that many of my books are missing! Since those are an investment that I make each year, I really don't want them to wander off!).
I'll let you know as the year progresses how the organization is going!
