I’m not sure about you, but I have a ton of books in my classroom. I got a lot of them through points from student book orders, as well as garage sales, donations from parents, and library book sales.
If you also have a lot of books for your room, make sure that you haven’t just shoved your books into a corner and forgotten about them or have them set up in such disarry that nobody is interested in looking. This can easily happen when you’re teaching the older grades and don’t have as much time for independent reading time. A few space saving ideas for organizing books that you may not have thought of before are to use shoe boxes, a shoe organizer, or milk crates.
To use shoe boxes, you can place books, spine up in a shoe box and pile the boxes on top of each other. Let the students decorate the boxes to give them more incentive to take a book. Organize them by theme, author, reading level, or however you want. This also gives you the option of putting the lid on the box and putting it away when you don’t want those books circulating any longer. This might hold true if you have a box of books on a particular theme or are tired of the students only going for certain popular or trendy books.
Hang a clear plastic shoe organizer over a door and put a book inside each pocket. Turn a milk crate sideways and get an instant shelf.
There are many ways to organize and store your selection of books. Check out section one (chapter 6) for other great ideas to organize a classroom libraryhttp://www.tipsforteachers.net/store/youve-got-the-job-now-keep-it/.
Leave us a comment and let us know some of your favorite organizational ideas!
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Recently a friend posted a link on Facebook regarding a Kumon Program. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/fashion/with-kumon-fast-tracking-to-kindergarten.html?_r=2&ref=education I don’t know a lot about the program itself and so I am not commenting on that particular program. What I am commenting on is the fundamentals of what the article was discussing, which is the concept of having young children…
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