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 With the Tournament

Wow! I’m going to share with you the start of our March Madness: Tournament of Books, but first let me say I think the kiddos took “madness” to heart! State Testing + Indoor Recess Weather = Madness in Room 21. Hopefully, just like the weather in March, they will be in like a lion, out like a lamb! 

 

Luckily, despite the silliness, we are still learning! Last week I changed our bulletin board in anticipation of the start of our March Madness. It’s not too late to join in, seeing as the correlating tournament has yet to begin! I found my vision from Brown Bag Teacher and she has GREAT, FREE resources to get you started! I changed them a bit to work with my class but it was a great visual to get me started!

First, I made a list of the books we’ve read as a class or that are always flying off our class library shelves. Then, I paired the favorites together (Dr. Seuss competed against Dr. Seuss, Grace for President competed against Duck for President.)

The actual creating the brackets on the board took some thought and planning, but still managed to turned out how I imagined.

This week we discussed what the actual NCAA Men's Basketball Championship was and the similarities to our own Tournament of Books. The first round of books were Dr. Seuss, which worked out perfectly with his birthday! The Lorax went up against Bartholomew and the Oobleck and won. To cast their vote students completed a book review. Slowly and painfully our book reviews are improving. It’s shocking sometimes how quickly students forget how to write a summary. I’ll chalk it up to our weird week again.

As our class bookie, and in my professional opinion, I think the best bet is Diary of a Wimpy Kid or The Day the Crayons Quit.  

The One with a Birthday!

Today was my favorite birthday to celebrate all year… the amazing Dr. Seuss! The kids know him as my favorite genius in the whole world and we loved getting to put the spotlight on his works! 

But first, we took the first part of our standardized tests. Woah! Talk about two different classroom environments. I tried to lighten the mood with some encouraging words and a little Katy Perry before...I'll let you know in a few months if it helped. 

Since our day was cut drastically short because of testing our entire week in Literacy will be dedicated to this great author. (Not like it would be too hard, there isn’t enough time in a week to learn everything we could about him!)

Here’s a peek into our day/week…Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss! 

To start our day we read Bartholomew and the Oobleck. I love this one because *most* my kiddos haven't read it before. They are always on the edge of their seats. In pairs they worked on comprehension and short response questions. And somehow they don't ever see it coming that we make Oobleck! Surprise! Today's batch came out a little too watery but it was still fun! 

As one kiddo put it, "It kind of just feels like green water, but I can imagine it!" A for effort, right?

 

With P.E. and ELD in the afternoon Oobleck was a large chunk of our Dr. Seuss Day. During ELD (English Language Development) we did more to celebrate! Students read a reader's theater based on Green Eggs and Ham. We are working on expression, fluency, and for fun...props! We will share our skits tomorrow.

 The rest of the week we will continue to read different Seuss books and do little comprehension activities! Here's just a peak: 

Suessville ... a fun Seuss website (the next few days we will have indoor recess for weather) it's already downloaded to use on the iPads and computer. 

 Family Feud ... fun and silly PowerPoints that get kids thinking about Dr. Seuss, rhyming words, and fun questions.  

 

Dr. Seuss Biography ... One from TpT  (free!) and one on Superteacher with an account.

Book Apps ... I also went a little way overboard with my iTunes gift cards and bought quite a few Dr. Seuss books for our iPads. My tutoring kids tested them out... love the extra features like vocabulary words and being able to click on any picture and see the word. 

And finally... no birthday would be complete with out a treat! These will be passed out throughout the week. Can you tell which book they belong with?! (Don't tell me if you can't) 

Thanks for reading and I hope you were able to celebrate Seuss today!