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.