ORGANIZING YOUR CLASSROOM LIBRARY

One of our major summer projects was . . .

Organizing

the
CLASSROOM LIBRARY!

It took time but it is finally finished!

Like all teachers we had three main hurdles to

 a beautifully organized class library:  

Time, Money, Space!  

We never have enough of any of them!

To make the project manageable we spent part of our summer organizing and labeling our leveled library.  We had to clear out our rooms entirely so it was easier to start fresh this summer! One plastic storage tub of books came home at a time. Books were labeled with stickers (see below), sorted, organized into the tub, and returned to class.  

And the process continued with tub after tub until we finished!

Click HERE for BOOK LABELS

Once we were able to get back into our classroom the set up began. We started by creating book box labels that matched our class leveled library stickers. We printed the labels on card stock, laminated them, and used a hot glue gun to stick the box labels onto our book baskets.   

Click HERE for BOOK BOX LABELS

These white baskets can be found at Walmart. They are also available at walmart.com ~ 12 small baskets are $29.99 ~ about $2.50 each. We're using small baskets for the Leveled Library section of our class library. Because our kiddos are in Kindergarten and First, we'll start the year with two baskets for each of Level A-F books and one basket each of Level G-L books.  Last year we started the year with one basket each for Level A-Z books but it took a ton of space and our students were not ready for level M books until late January or February. 

The next step was to set up the rest of our library. We found larger white baskets and some turquoise metal tubs at Target and used these for our other books. We try to keep at least 10 baskets of books out by Author or Genre/Theme in addition to our Leveled Library. We switch up these book every couple of weeks (popular tubs may stay our longer).


If you would like these BOOK BOX & BOOK LABELS for your library please click HERE!
The labels come with either a black or white background and are editable!

We've tried several different ways to level our
libraries including:

Scholastic's Book Wizard

Level It

booksource.com is a great place to buy books 

if you need to add books for a specific level. 

While we were shopping on their site, we realized we could also use it to help level some of our books!

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about organizing your classroom library!

Happy Organizing! Happy Reading!