Classroom Library: Filling the Shelves

To view previous posts in this series, click below.

Classroom Library Part 1: Supplies
Classroom Library Part 2: Getting Started

Hopefully, you haven’t agonized too much over the last two steps because I don’t want you to have lost steam. THIS is the important part — having plenty of texts at many different levels accessible to all students at all times. So let’s get started!

1. Figure out some kind of sorting system. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Remember how I asked you before how you were going to catalog your books and sort them? If you haven’t decided already, do it now. My books are sorted by genre/series (for fiction), and Dewey decimal number (for non-fiction). I have a few partner reading buckets that are sorted by reading level. Our school also uses Accelerated Reader, so my books are labeled with the schoolwide leveling system as well.

2. Decide how you want to process and add your books. For me, this meant starting fresh — pulling every single book off my shelf and reintroducing them into the library as I processed them. It’s not the most efficient (I still have six boxes of books to catalog), but it helped keep my brain clear (a daunting challenge). You might want to sort your books into different bins first, or you might want to label them first.

3a. If you’re leveling books and/or cataloging books, open several tabs in your browser. Open your cataloging site in one tab, your leveling site (Renaissance Learning, Scholastic, Fountas & Pinnell, probably) in another. Open Pandora in a third so you don’t go crazy.

3b. Get your books in check-out condition. For me, this meant putting a book pocket on the inside title page (many people use the inside front cover because then you don’t block the inside title page, but I find that paperback books are easier to keep open if you put them on the title page). I then wrote the title on an index card and inserted it into the book. I looked up the AR level of my book, entered the book into LibraryThing, and put the book in a stack ready for AR tape and bucket number.

4. Sort your books. I put AR tape on the top of the spine of the book so the color can be seen when it’s sitting inside a book bucket. I stick a mailing seal to the upper left corner of the back cover of the book, and I write the book bucket number on the back.

5. Add books to your library. Put your book buckets on your shelves, add your books to them, and admire your handiwork.

6. A word on templates. When I first organized my classroom library, I saved a ton of time by printing my book bucket labels and check-out cards in Microsoft Word (otherwise I would have had to hand-letter cards for my entire classroom set of The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle). This also saves time if you have a lot of guided reading book sets. Now, if your printer is fussy or you’re a bit of a technophobe, templates will probably cause you more frustration than joy. If despite this you’re still finicky enough to want ALL your materials typed out, then you’ll want to see the templates I’ll be posting tomorrow in Library Upkeep.

Please feel free to share and use this information as you see fit. If you’re able to take a moment to leave a comment, though, it completely makes my day and my students usually squeal with delight.

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