Classroom Library

My classroom library has been my big project of the day. Thanks to the wonderful world of Pinterest, I found a great website for cataloging my classroom library books and setting up a "check out" system for when my students want to borrow my books instead of the ones in the school library. The link for the website is below. I was able to use their iPhone app to scan the bar codes of my books and the system automatically loads the title, author, etc. One thing I forgot about is the Scholastic Book Club books don't have bar codes sometimes. Those need to be typed in by hand, which takes a bit more time. Usually you just enter the ISBN number and it finds the book in the system for you. A few of my random science books needed me to type the title and author by hand. My theory is once it's done I'll only have to do it once in a while when I add a book or two to my collection. This is still a work in progress, so we'll see how it goes.


Booksource Class Library Website

Below are a few pictures of my class library. It is one of the few things that stays consistently organized in my classroom. I have set it up in a way that the kids always know how to put a book back. Thanks to the wonderful jmeacham website, I labeled my book bins a few years ago. I used her labels, glued them on 3x5 cards, and taped them on plastic shoe bins with packaging tape. My kids always struggled to know what category some of our stories fell into when two or more made sense (such as "silly stories" and "animal fiction" work for Duck on a Bike). I started putting colored dots on the back of each book and on the front of each bin so the students could match them. Each dot had one or two words such as "silly" or "science."

Two related subjects in the same box to save space along with their corresponding dots

Sticker dots taped over with packing tape