I started something new this school year. I had seen references to Daily 5 for years, but had never done any investigation into what exactly that was. So, on a whim, I ordered the book by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser and started reading. Almost immediately, I was hooked. While this post isn’t about the Daily 5 (I will definitely be posting more about my experience with it later this year) this system has had a tremendous affect on my classroom library!
Building My Library
I am a books person: a Grade-A, certified Book Worm. I come from a long line of readers and book hoarders. I worked for Borders Books and Waldenbooks for several years before becoming a teacher and put my employee discounts there to good use. It follows, therefore, that as a teacher one of the aspects of teaching I most love is the books!
Collecting books for my classroom has always been a joy. This past summer, I won the James Patterson and Scholastic $500 book grant and I am still soaring! I spent that money on books for my classroom faster than you can say, “classroom library”. I added a ton of graphic novels and nonfiction and series that have been popular with my students over the past several years. It’s been very exciting slowly adding these books to our class library and introducing them to my students.
Creating Categories
A system has been in place for several years when it comes to how I organize my library. Books are broken into genres and in some cases, into series or authors, depending on the number of books we have that fit into that category.
This year, with the addition of all our new books, there has been the need to add even more categories. As it stands now, we have 53 different book categories! This has really helped students to find “just right” books and track down their favorites.
How Our System Works
Once a book is assigned a category, it gets a sticker and the category’s number on its cover. Bins are labeled with the genre or series and are also assigned a sticker with its number. Students know that if they are helping reshelve or putting a book back that they are not interested in, they just locate the number on the book and find the corresponding bin.
Because of our Covid restrictions, this year, students return books to our Quarantine Box, where books will quarantine for at least 3 days before I reshelve them. I also use an app (I use Book Buddy) to track which books are checked out to which students.
Next Week:
I’ll be talking more about how my students use the library as a part of Daily 5, how they store their books, and what Book Shopping looks like in our classroom!
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