Your classroom library is awesome. Your kids are taking great care of it. How can you add new books without having the whole system fall apart?
Keep your supplies ready and nearby. I have a bucket (and you KNOW by now that it’s a Sterilite Ultra basket) that I keep filled with extra pockets, index cards, labels, and pens. The only extra step I need to make outside of the classroom when adding books is steal down to the library to borrow some AR tape.
Lolrus knows the value of a bucket.
Add quality books. Chances are, you have a lot of books. Unless you’re a brand new teacher, in which case you should get thee with all possible haste to a library book sale! So now that you’re past just filling the shelves, make sure you’re adding quality books. New books, unusual books, books you don’t have at the school library. Non-fiction books. Almanacs and books of facts. The vast number of children’s literature blogs is truly insane, so I just started reading Betsy Bird’s fantastic Fuse #8 Production and added from there.
Talk with your students about new additions. We’ve been reading a lot of recently published books checked out from the Seattle Public Library this year. The day before the ALA Awards are announced, we’ll hold a Mock Caldecott and I’ll buy the top three books to add to our classroom library.
Don’t be afraid to edit. Even with the best treatment, books get worn. Series become less popular. Non-fiction books become dated. You start to realize that the books you snapped up for crazy-cheap your first year of teaching haven’t been checked out since… your first year of teaching, if ever. Pass them on! If I pull a book from our classroom library, I cross out my name from the inside (but keep the pocket and card, of course) and put it in our staff room. If it doesn’t find a new home in a month, I take the books to Goodwill or the Seattle Public Library. Yes, I probably could sell the books on Craigslist or Amazon Marketplace, but I’d rather support the aforementioned nonprofits.
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.
It’s Friday Choice. A and X are busily working to finish their perimeter homework, a group of students in the back of the room are singing the Double Rainbow song, and I found this recording of the Caldecott award-winning Joseph Had a Little Overcoat.
You can find a teacher copy of this book and the Targeted Treasure Hunt for it in the red Silly Book mentor text bucket in the bookroom. We have a complete set of lesson plans left over from our SFA book set, which might be useful for comprehension questions and vocabulary lessons. We also have 29 student copies, separated into book sets of six each and filed under Guided Reading level M.
The SFA suggested instructional goal is “questioning II,” which involves asking questions that can be proven in the text as well as asking higher level questions. There isn’t a CAFE menu in the bag yet, as I am writing this post during Snowpocalypse 2010 and I don’t have access to the copy machine.
If you’re using this in a unit on families, we also have book sets on grandmas for Fountas and Pinnell levels D and E (DRA 5 and 8), and a billion books on families. I’m sure there are many others that would fit into the category — I’ve only searched for books with grandma or families in the title or subject tags.
Additionally, you might also want to take the unit in the direction of women making breakthroughs in baseball.
In a few days, I’ll be sharing some of the best ways to add new books to your classroom library.
Hands down one of the cheapest (and most charitable) options is to pay a visit to your local Friends of the Public Library book sale. Some public library systems sell books by weight, some have a flat rate, and some even have a “Better Books” section where you can find brand new or nearly-new titles.
Things like bags of books for crazy cheap. You must go.
One other tip, and I’m not really sure if this is totally legit. Last year, we went on the Friends’ preview night, where you’re limited to 25 books. We, of course, couldn’t limit ourselves to 25 books. But when another patron heard of our plight and saw we were from a school, she gave us her voucher, because she hadn’t bought all 25. Score! I obviously wanted to stay the rest of the evening and poach more voucher cards, but I was denied.
Hopefully this hasn’t been a terribly painful process, but we can probably all agree that it has been a pretty significant amount of work. So I think we can also agree that after having invested the time and energy into setting up a fantastic classroom library, you probably want it to stay that way. Here are some ideas that have worked for our class.
Love your library. At the beginning of the year, all my bookshelves are covered with butcher paper or fabric. After we discuss classroom library expectations (I think there’s a primary literacy book for teachers that talks about a “proper treatment of books” lesson), we unveil one bookshelf at a time, talking about the books students will find there.
Let your students try out new books. Even if you know they’re way above their level. Even if you’ve done the “pick a just-right book” lesson a dozen times. Let them try out new books, BUT make sure you confer with them pretty quickly afterward and help steer them to a better fit book. You don’t want to stifle their interest in discovering new books!
Maintain high expectations. Wildcat Leaders (self-managers) are allowed to check out two books, and students who bring back their homework regularly are allowed to put a sticky-note in the check out book and bring their book home overnight. One of the reasons why I catalog my books is because my students know
Don’t let checking out descend into chaos. My students know they can check out a classroom library book on Monday morning as soon as they come into the room. If they’d like to check out a book before the following Monday, they can do so at the start of their recess. No exceptions. This might sound strict until you’ve seen 25 children trying to fit into a library corner. Other teachers in our building have students check out new books on the days when they turn in their reading response journal, and still others don’t have a firm policy, although I’m not sure how they manage to stay sane and not lose a million books.
Have a system for repair. My students know that if a book is damaged, they need to check it back in, put a sticky note on the cover explaining what’s wrong, then put it in the Ms. Houghton basket.
Show them the process. My students were flabbergasted when they discovered I bought most of our books with my own money. Their eyes nearly popped out of their heads when they went to the book fair and discovered that a new copy of Steve Jenkin’s Bonescost nearly $20 in hardcover. Just make sure you tell them in a tone meant to inform them, not as a threat to them or a complaint about the hardships of teaching.
Involve your class. Although my class is younger this year, I still have a librarian whose job is to daily comb through the library on his or her way to second recess to make sure books aren’t sticking out in crazy directions. About once a month, or whenever it’s awful outside and a bunch of kids beg to stay in at recess, I have them turn the book buckets around to look at the book bucket numbers to make sure everything’s in its correct bucket.
Keep it fresh. Find out how to expand your library without going insane by viewing our next installment in this series, Adding to Your Collection.
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.
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.
All our math books are in bucket 510. We talk in class about the fact that the Dewey Decimal uses at least three digits, so bucket 030 (books of facts) is different from bucket 30 (Judy Moody books).
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.
Leveled and ready for check-out!
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.
AR Tape.
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.
Now that you’ve got all your supplies collected, take a look around your classroom. There are a lot of factors to take into consideration when you’re thinking about what your classroom library will look like. That doesn’t mean you need to agonize and ponder endlessly over ideas, but it does mean you want to be intentional with the decisions you make. Some points to think over:
How old are your kids? The kindergarteners in Mrs. Terry’s class wouldn’t have a chance if they wanted to pick out books from the bookshelves in my classroom. And my kids probably wouldn’t give the books on Mrs. Terry’s lowest shelf a second glance. The physical size of your students will impact their browsing patterns. I’ve actually found that books tucked away in a corner get a ton of traffic from my kids because they often like to cuddle themselves up in corners to work independently.
How big are your books? Kindergarten teacher Ms. Nietering uses blue bins from IKEA to store her books, and it has worked out well for her the past few years. If I were to use them on my shelves, there would be a tremendous amount of wasted space. Plus, my kids would have a difficult time seeing the covers of novels. I do have a few blue bins for some of our picture books, but I still prefer the Sterilite Ultra bins I mentioned in the last post.
How much space do you have? Ms. Stock once told me that if she put all her books in buckets, they would overrun her whole room (kind of like in my room, huh? :)). That was probably especially true when she was in our school’s diminutive portable. Her 3rd-5th graders pick their books out from a clearly labeled library nook. She also has the advantage of working with students who are more likely than average to investigate books when only the spines are visible — cover visibility is pretty much the only reason I switched to book buckets.
How big is your budget? If you don’t want to drop a ton on new bookshelves or book buckets, look in your school’s or your district’s surplus collection. Servicable book bins can be found at dollar stores or in the dollar section at Target. I can’t remember the last time Miss Turner bought a bookshelf, but she still has plenty of space to store her classroom library. Our school has a tradition of putting any unwanted furniture in the hallway at the end of the school year, so it’s always nice to go hallway-shopping for a new shelf or two.
How many books do you have? How many do you want? When I started my classroom library, I began with more generalized buckets — Mysteries, Silly Stories, Animals. Then, as I added more books and the buckets became full, I created more series-specific buckets. I added a dog books bucket and a dinosaur books bucket, and I replaced the book bucket labels on the backs of my books whenever I made a change.
How involved will your kids be? A few great texts on classroom libraries highly recommend that your students put together their classroom library at the beginning of the year. Several teachers at our school do this, but I’m a bit of a control freak. Whenever I add new books to our classroom library, though, I do always ask students where they think the books should go.
I ADORE this reading of There Are Cats in this Book. Many thanks are due to Library Assistant Mrs. Cole, who introduced me to the book in the first place (and purchased a copy for our school library!). Thanks also to Betsy Bird, who shared the video.
Our second author study this year was David Wiesner. I usually do author studies for one week because I have so many other ideas racing around that I want to move on after a week, but this outline can be shortened or extended as needed. Comments are always appreciated so I know whether this post was useful!
MONDAY: Kicking off the study
This year we’ve been reading many books that are elligible for the 2011 Caldecott, so I was dying to share Art and Max with our class. I didn’t even think to make this an author’s study until my students expressed shock that Wiesner had written other books that were very different from Art and Max.
Art connections
Part of the reason why our class understood the humor in Art and Max was that we just so happened to use all three media that are referenced in the book — tempera paint, chalk pastels, and watercolors.
We learned about pointillism, because at one point Art appears to have been created in the pointillist style. I made a Powerpoint of several famous pieces from the movement, and students made their own creation using markers. I had them make their dots in groups of ten, which led us into our next math lesson…
Large Number Estimation
The book Great Estimations is excellent for helping students see why it can be more practical to use estimations or skip counting to find a total. Prior to reading this book, about 3/4 of my students would refuse to round when solving an estimation problem, OR they would solve the entire problem, then just round their answer at the very end.
TUESDAY: Learning more about the author
On Tuesday, we read Tuesday. It honestly wasn’t planned that way. I’m nerdy, yes, but I’m not that cheesy. Most of our class’ favorite lessons are completely serendipitous. Tuesday is often used as a text for working on prediction, but about half of my class read the book last year, so I introduced the strategy of Making a Picture in Your Head instead. We discussed how the pictures Wiesner paints are so vivid, we don’t even need words because we can make a mind movie of the entire story in our heads.
We also began noticing some craft choices Wiesner made in both Tuesday and Art and Max. Students pointed out that both stories seemed to have a somewhat circular ending, and they also noticed that Wiesner often divides a page into three panels then uses the three panels to show some form of time lapse (paint flying in Art and Max, frogs flying in Saturday)
Large Number Estimation
I copied three pictures of Art from Art and Max, then made enough copies for the whole class. Students estimated how many dots were in each picture. They explained their estimation strategies, and many talked about how they figured out what ten dots looked like, then applied that to the whole picture. Others counted how many dots were in one square inch (using inch pattern tiles), then counted the number of tiles they needed to cover the picture.
Computer Lab
Before we went down to the computer lab, I pulled up these interviews with Wiesner.
David Wiesner’s Web site is fantastic. My students loved being able to see Wiesner’s creative process and images from many of his books. As we read books throughout the rest of the week, they would often exclaim, “Hey! That was on his Web site!”
WEDNESDAY and THURSDAY: Flotsam
Flotsam was one of the longest picture books we’d read so far this year, plus there was so much to look at, so we split this book over two days.
I needed to build some background for my students on this book, as none of them had ANY idea what film was (way to make me feel ancient at age 27, guys) and most hadn’t seen a microscope before.
I also gave us two days to ruminate on the book because my students were a little more confused by the fantasy aspects of the book. When we first started the book, we had a lengthy conversation about whether it was fact or fiction — the pictures looked very realistic, and we knew from David Wiesner’s Web site that he was inspired by a trip to the beach. But as the book progresses, it becomes increasingly absurd. We talked about how we had to change our predictions and ideas about the text as we received new information.
Splitting the book into two days also gave our class time to let the humor sink in. On Thursday, RO got a huge grin on his face and frantically waved his hand around when he saw an underwater living room scene. “There’s one of those fish that lights up — an angler fish! It’s lighting up the lamp! This is totally fiction!”
Library checkout
When we go to the library, I usually do a brief read-aloud before students check out their books. This week, I read The Three Pigs and asked Mrs. Cole to pull all our David Wiesner books to form a mini-display. I chose The Three Pigs because the story was enjoyable enough without needing outside explanations from me, so we were able to use this as a straight read aloud.
FRIDAY: Wiesner’s other works
In our literacy block, I read June 29, 1999. Because this was Friday, I explained to students that this would be our chance to really put the strategy of Make a Picture in Your Head to work. Unlike many other Wiesner books, there is text in June 29, 1999, but the pictures aren’t quite as straight-forward as they are in his other books. We’d have to fill in the blanks.
Had I read June 29, 1999 at the beginning of the week, I’m fairly certain my students would have been perplexed, at best. But they got into it right away — “Look, he’s doing the three panel thing again to show time passing!” “This looks like the neighborhood in Tuesday, except it’s happening at day instead of night!” “This is kind of like a weird Magic School Bus book, because she’s growing plants, but it’s not realistic!” “It’s like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs but with all healthy food!” I could have hugged them all.
Using Classroom Resources
I asked students if they had ideas of where to find David Wiesner books on their own in our classroom. They guessed in the “Good Picture Books” bucket, the “Caldecott Winners” bucket, and then AE spoke up and made my life. “Miz Houghton,” he said, gesturing wildly to book bucket 34: Scary Stories. “David Wiesner illustrated the book about Gargoyles, I saw pictures from it on the Web site.” He pulled out Night of the Gargoyles. AB piped up. “Yeah, that one’s written by Eve Bunting, she wrote that Wall book Mr. Rosand read to us in library class.”
Culminating exercise
I suppose I could have/should have had some grand end-of-the-week assessment to ascertain whether this was a valuable series of lessons, but based on how much kids were writing about David Wiesner’s books in their reading response journals, I decided it was a success.
Our first Bookroom Book of the week is David Wiesner’s The Three Pigs. You can find it in the red Fables and Fairy Tales bin in the bookroom.
This book won the 2002 Caldecott award, and you can find out more about it from David Wiesner’s Web site here. You can even read his 2002 acceptance speech here.
The bag includes a lesson connected with Washington state EALRs 2.1.3: Connects previous experience and knowledge when reading. and 2.2.1 Finds similarities and differences in texts. Pages in the texts are marked with labels for suggested comprehension questions.
As with most of our bookroom books, you can find a CAFE menu highlighted in the bag. I saw several routes that lessons could take — please highlight others with your ideas! If you’d like a copy of the CAFE menu aligned to Washington state standards, one should be laminated and attached to the side of the bookshelf immediately inside the bookroom door.
Potential mini-lessons:
Retell the story (you could also have students make a plot grid where they compare and contrast the different versions of The Three Little Pigs. A great blackline master for book comparison is available on Appendix p. 30 in Guiding Readers and Writers by Fountas and Pinnell)
Use prior knowledge to connect with text
Recognize literary elements (genre, plot, problem/resolution, theme)
Reread text (particularly if students are reading several different versions of The Three Little Pigs)
Practice high-frequency words (and phrases — if you see a fairy tale that starts with “Once,” chances are you know that it will begin with “Once upon a time.” That’s how good readers can start reading in phrases instead of word-by-word.)
When we read fairy tales or fables in class, my students inevitably ask, “But who wrote it FIRST?” They are often completely perplexed to discover there isn’t THE FIRST Aesop’s Fables or THE FIRST Cinderella that they can put their hands on. That’s why I think this site is so fantastic. It shows several “original versions” of The Three Little Pigs from across the globe.
You can also take the Fractured Fairy Tales route. Sometimes bookstores understand my brain so well that it’s scary. Here are Barnes and Noble’s suggestions.
Hope this was helpful! Let me know if any of these resources were useful in your class.
Ms. Houghton's Class 