I love books! Over the years I have amassed quite the classroom library, along with many many read alouds. I keep my read alouds stored separately from the books I allow the students to read. Once I’ve read a text to the students, I put it in a “Teacher Read Aloud” bin for the students to take from and read whenever they’d like.
The books in my classroom library, which I consider to be the books the students have access to whenever they like, are all placed in plastic bins from the dollar store. I have each bin labelled and on that label is also a sticker. For example, my Canada book bin has a label with a map of Canada on it, and also in the bottom corner is a Canadian flag sticker. Then, each book in the bin has a Canadian flag sticker too. This way, the students simply need to match the stickers to know which bin the books go in. This saves me from finding random books in random bins. I do, of course, have an “I don’t know where it goes” bin too – just in case.
The storage system I use for my read aloud picture books is quite simple. I have tonnes of these:
They are the Flyt magazine holders from Ikea. I like that they are super inexpensive at $2.99 for 5, and they fit a whole lot of books in each. I label each bin with the strategy/subject/theme etc… of the books it contains.
Now, at this point I would normally post a picture of my classroom bookshelves, however, I am currently enjoying the last few months of maternity leave. So… all of my read alouds and classroom library are in boxes in my basement storage areas. I have yet to decide if I want to bring all of my read aloud picture books back to my classroom with me when I return or if I want to set them up on bookshelves in the basement.
Since I have so many different texts, I decided I wanted a digital tracking system to help me easily input a text what I would use it for. For this I use www.goodreads.com . Goodreads is actually a social networking site for book lovers. You input books you’ve read, rate them, and they will suggest other titles for you. If your friends have an account, you can see what they’ve been reading, and recommend books to them. What I have done is use it to input all of my picture books. I then assign each book to a virtual “shelf”. This way, the next time I’m developing a critical pathway or looking for a text to target a specific strategy, I can search my Goodreads shelves easily and from any computer which will help me with planning either at home or at school. It’s taken me a while to input my books, but now that it’s done, I’m extremely happy with it. No more searching through my actual books and bookshelves to find a book that fits a certain topic. Any way that saves me time when planning out my lessons is a win in my book.
What are some ways you keep your classroom libraries organized?
No comments:
Post a Comment