Books, books, everywhere!

**this is a guest post I wrote a few weeks ago and just realized I never published it here!

Hello everyone! This is Clare from A Day in the Life. For my guest post I wanted to share with you how I organize my classroom library. Even though it's only my 3rd year teaching (is that all? feels like much longer!), I have a TON of books! I've been collecting them for years- picking them up at garage sales, rummage sales, used books from the library, etc. And for the past 2 years that hasn't really been any rhyme or reason as to how they were organized. They were just flung on a shelf and I had to sift through them all when I needed a certain book.

At the end of last school year, my long term sub (I was out on medical leave) packed up my ENTIRE classroom. So when I opened all the boxes with books and saw they were all jumbled up, I decided this was the perfect opportunity to reorganize. Here's what I came up with!

These 4 tubs have my science/social studies books for our four "modules"- Community Helpers, World Cultures (USA for my class), Weather/Seasons and Animals.

This is a bookshelf I got last year through Donor's Choose. It's hard to see the labels, but the books are all sorted into categories: rhyming books, math books, ABC books, various Lang. Arts books, school books, books about feelings, and fairy tales/fables.

And here's my last bookshelf! It has all my author tubs as well as other categories.

Here's a close up of the labels I made. You can find some of them HERE on my Google Docs. Sorry I don't have them all to share, I can't find the other file (I made some 2 years ago and I guess I didn't save that file!).

The first day of school, the kids won't be able to see any of the books. The shelves will be "wrapped" in butcher paper, and as we learn classroom rules and procedures they'll gain book privileges. Last year I had to limit their access because they kept putting the books back in the wrong place, but I think this year with plenty of practice it'll work great!

Looking forward to a great school year and no more searching for lost books!!