Reorganizing our classroom library

Our organizing is getting better because it was messy at the start, but now it's getting more organized. - Easton

 

I know which books are in which bin now, because it's more organized. - Zoey

 

We put certain books in certain bins, so now we know what we're looking for, so we don't have to go up to Mr. H. and ask him. - Kayleigh

 

Thanks to our wonderful organizing team, we don't have to drive Mr. H. CRAZY! - Emily

 

Thanks to our organizing team, we have a great classroom because now we don't have to drive Mr. H. INSANE, and now he won't have a headache. - Austin

 

With our library being organized, our classroom is 10x better because I can find my favourite books. - Jaida

 

Now that we're organizing, there's baskets on a lot of the carpet, so we have to squish in together, but I just let everyone go first and proper spot. - Maegehn

 

Organizing a classroom library is a big job, and one that I haven't really tackled since I moved into my classroom back in 2006 (has it really been that long ago?!). However, I've been finding that the students keep asking me if we have a certain kind of book (which is apparent from some of the above comments!), because they don't know what is in the library. To rectify this, I decided that the classroom should re-organize our library. This involved sorting through all of the books, and deciding what categories we should put them into. Then, after beginning our organizing, and realizing that we had a lot of books that didn't belong in any of the ones the students came up with, we changed/added/removed some categories. I need to pick up some more bins to put our books in now, but other than that, this big job is almost done (I am toying with the idea of using an app to keep track of the books in our classroom library, but that's a topic for another post) - check out what this learning through 'controlled chaos' looked like: