However, I knew building my classroom library would be difficult...and expensive! I have lots of primary-aged books in my house (and I plan on keeping those for future baby Tacketts someday) but I had hardly any upper elementary fiction or nonfiction books on hand. Luckily, several reading teachers in my building gave me several books and my amazing librarian gave me all of the new Mark Twain Award Nominee books from this past year and next year. I was off to a good start, but knew I had a long way to go before my classroom library would have enough of a variety.
Then, last week my friend Bridget asked me if I wanted to go to a Book Fair sponsored by the library district in our area. You could fill up an entire shopping bag of books and pay only $5 a bag! I was in!
When Bridget, our friend Amanda (they are both High School English teachers), and I got inside the convention center where the Book Fair was held, it was like a book-lovers paradise. They had thousands of books in every genre you could imagine. It took us a while to spot the elementary aged books, but once we found them, I dove in and searched for the perfect books to add to my new classroom library!
Since then, I've been exploring different ways to organize my classroom library. I know I'm going to separate books by genre in plastic bins, and I think I'm going to use a card system like this one here (honestly, what did people do before Pinterest?) to help me keep track of the locations of my books.
I also downloaded an awesome app called BooksApp that allows you to scan the ISBN of any book and input the book's information (title, pages, author, genre) into your phone. I plan on using this app to help me categorize books into genres! Best of all, it's free! :)
Anyone have any classroom library tips? Any tried and true systems?
Are you following me on Pinterest?