The One With An Organized Book Room

In general, and by general I mean Pinterest, school bookrooms aren’t often talked about or explained. How do you keep all those books neat? What is the checkout system? Where do you put them all? Today I asked myself all those questions and I will attempt to answer them in this post! I may or may not have made it clear that I am a clean-freak, borderline OCD. If it hasn’t been made clear before, this post will lay it out for you!

My great friend and coworker (so lucky I work with some of my closest friends!) and both love a clean room. Her room is impeccable and mine tries to keep up! There is one room in our school though that could use a touch of OCD and that was our book room. Maybe a whole slap of OCD. 

Here’s the before: 

Our school is lucky enough to have a book room and we wanted it to be used to the best ability. The books came in the middle of last year, at different times, and smooth system couldn’t be made. Next year will be different! 

In addition to organizing the book room we wanted to go a step further (into full blown crazy) and move it into our storage closet. Our storage closet with things from the 70s and dust from before I was born. I wish took a before of this room, instead we have the hallway this room threw up in. 

*This might have been over our heads*

We started by taking everything out of the old storage closet, about 45 minutes in we realized why it’s been 30 years since anyone’s touched it. Luckily, we had summer school students minions to help move everything out. Unluckily, 8 year olds don’t stack things in the most efficient way and our hallway quickly looked like this. To be honest, after a full day it still kind of looks like this:

I would like to point out, this is one half of the hallway.

Once it was all cleared out and sparking we could begin the process of organizing (our true passion in life.) Most books were labeled, some were in the right boxes. Our favorite leveling app today was Scholastic Book Wizard. Most of the books were scholastic so it was easiest to use their app. In my own classroom library I’ve used Level It and Lit Leveler.

The actual process of organizing the bookroom went pretty smoothly! We both set aside our love for matching bins and KGFonts to create a pretty nice looking book room! (If I don’t say so myself!)

 

Gotta love a good before and after! 

The most important part of getting this bookroom organized is keeping the bookroom organized! We don’t have it all figured out, but here’s what’s in place so far:

1.    Each shelf (or two) is designated to ONE book level. This way the book room can grow and we won’t be redoing it next summer!

2.    Each colored bin represents a type of book throughout the room. Blue bins are leveled books without teacher guides, red are scholastic leveled books with teacher guides, and yellow are Mondo leveled books with teacher guides. (This is what I think will keep them organized the most!!)

3.    Accountability. This is where we could use some help. We’re thinking of giving each teacher 5 clothes pins to use to clip to the book bins they are using, enough for each small group. This way they can easily remember which level and which colored bin. Expert OCD thoughts on this?

4. And a little...

Today was a lot of trial and a few errors. Overall we are happy with how the room looks! Tomorrow we will either clean and clear out the hallway or just sit in the bookroom with the door closed and admire our work. 

The One Where Summer School Starts

Week one of summer school is in the books! Our three week program has a lot of my future students in it and it’s getting me so excited for the next fall! (NOT to the point of wishing away summer, but still excited nonetheless) There are four of us teaching incoming 3-5 graders in a center rotation format. I see each student 25 minutes a day and I figured I’d share some of the successes we’ve had! 

Monday and Tuesday 

The first two days of summer school we focused on math concepts which students’ currently had misconceptions. Each group was a little different but topics included place value, rounding, and time. Summer school is a nice time to try out new teaching practices with smaller groups! 

Rounding was one area I strayed from our usual way of teaching to shake it up. Thanks to my obsession with Pinterest I found a great blog on rounding. It explains how to really teach foundational skills and the number sense behind rounding. Like anything good in life it took a little longer to explain but after two days of concrete work their reasoning for rounding has improved tenfold. For a more detailed look check out The Math Spot blog. (I won’t write anymore on it since it was not my own idea.)

Wednesday and Thursday

Each week we have a new theme that matches our Friday field trip! This week we went to the Ft. Collins Discovery Museum and watched an IMAX movie on space. So, Wednesday and Thursday we researched questions we had about space on the iPads. Three of the other rotations exposed the students to constellations, the planets, and other space topics. This gave them a good background for questions to keep asking at my center. 

Sometimes kickin’ it old school gives the best results. We used a KWL chart to keep track of what we already Knew, what we Wanted to learn, and then, what we Learned. Notice the change in both learned and want to learn! The more we learn the more questions we have. That’s my favorite part of a KWL chart is to show how learning never stops, even after our original questions are answered. 

Friday

            Our Friday field trip arrived and everyone survived the hour and a half it took our school bus to get to Ft. Collins. The Discovery Museum was fantastic! I always love children’s discovery museums and this was no exception. All of the exhibits had a hands-on factor that kept each child engaged (and hilarious hidden jokes and quotes for adults!) Our favorite was by far the music and sound exhibit. If anyone makes it to Ft. Collins and the brewery tours aren’t your deal, you can always learn about sound waves and Colorado native animals. ;)

These next few may give you a laugh, or show you that my humor has been brought down to an 8 year old's level. 

Overall a fun week of summer school that kept the kiddos learning and having a safe summer. Next week we are learning all about the ocean and will head to the Denver Aquarium on Friday!