Redesigning Our Class Library

When you visited our room for your fourth grader’s parent-teacher conference, you may have seen a table that was filled with boxes upon boxes, all filled with books.  No, this isn’t our new freestyle shelving system.  Rather, it’s a work in progress as we tackle a months-long project to reorganize our class library.

The project began at the start of the school year.  This year, our school’s goal is to harness the power of independent reading by (a) ensuring that structured independent reading time allows students to focus on specific skills, and (b) helping students to read books that are at an appropriate reading level for them.  (At our conference, you should have received a packet with information about your fourth grader’s reading level.  If you haven’t yet gotten one, it will be coming home tomorrow.  Please ask your kids for them, as they’re now in their mailboxes waiting to go home.)  In order to help students to find texts at their level, we’ve tackled a complete revision of our class library.

This started a few months ago with the forming of our class library committee.  It was open to any and all students who wanted to participate.  We ended up with 11 students, which has been terrific!  Our first task was to weed through our existing library and remove books that were either in poor condition or were unlikely to grab the interest of prospective readers.  I knew we needed plenty of room to add more books, so we were pretty ruthless in removing old books.  (I hate to throw away books, so many were given to students.)  Next, the kids went shopping, both in the Scholastic Book Club catalogs and at our school’s book fair.  They had the shopping cart, and Mr. Moss had the credit card!  Soon, we had a few hundred books to add to our library (and Mr. Moss’s splurge budget for the next few months shrunk!  HA! :-D)

Our next step was to catalog and level our books.  That serves two purposes.  First, we’ll be left with a searchable spreadsheet that will allow students to look for books by particular authors, books at a particular level, or books with a particular title.  Our library won’t be organized by these factors, necessarily, so having a resource within which they can search will be valuable!  Also. students are working to level the books.  All books have a level, which measures the text complexity.  That’s more than just how hard the WORDS are, and also includes style of writing, character situations, chronology, prior knowledge required, etc.  We’re looking up the reading levels based on what we find on Scholastic’s site, using an app, etc.  That information is getting added to the catalog spreadsheet.

Our next step, once all the books are cataloged and leveled will be to print out labels, both for the inside covers of the book and for sign-out cards that we’ll use to keep track of who has which book checked out.  Once that system is in place, you can expect students to start to bring home books at their level.  Stay tuned!

More cool news is that we’ll be receiving a leveled book cart from the district in the coming months.  What’s cool about this is that it will be organized differently from our library.  While our class library will be organized by theme, series, author, topic, genre, and other factors (with books of a variety of levels within each section), the book cart will be organized by level, with books of different topics within each level.  So when students want to search by topic, they can begin in our library.  When they want to search by level, they can begin with the cart.

This wouldn’t be possible without the incredibly hard work of our class library committee volunteers.  They’ve worked tirelessly to help us reach this point.  Now we’re in need of more help (from adults).  I’m looking for some volunteers to help us with the leveling of books.  Some parts can be done in school, with the committee members.  But for all of you who are unable to come during the day but still want to help, here’s an opportunity for you to help us from the comfort of your own home!  If you’d like to volunteer, please email me and tell me whether you’re looking for a daytime slot (M, T, or W between 1:30-2:00 – later on, other slots will open up as well) or if you’d like an at-home job, which can be done at your convenience.  As usual, I’ll follow-up with you to let you know what’s available, since we may have more volunteers than needed.  (What a GREAT problem to have!)  Thank you for considering!

Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss