Book Shopping

I love Daily 5!! Today was my second day introducing D5 and it went amazingly well today too. My scholars have built their stamina to seven minutes and are begging for more reading time. I'm loving it. Tomorrow I will introduce the cafe lesson tune into interesting words and my scholars will be able to pick their own spot to read to self. I am extremely excited to see how that goes.

I also taught my scholars how to use ourclassroom library. We discussed the various sections, the importance of keeping it neat and organized, how to check out and return books, and our one weekly shopping day. After this discussion, my scholars were super excited to "shop" for books. Even my most challenging students were eager to pick out books to fill their baskets. Check out the picture of the full book baskets.

You can also see the check out cards in that picture. As they shop for books, scholars will write the book title and bin/shelf number where they got the book from. This will make returning book easier because they wrote down exactly where each book belongs. Here is a better pic.

(Please ignore the handwriting.)

I wish I had remembered to take pictures of my scholars actually shopping for books, but I forgot. I hope this excitement about books and reading lasts all year!!

How do you have students check out books from the classroom library?

Classroom Library

I attended several professional development workshops and read several books over the summer and heard about the importance of having a well organized classroom library. My library has always been organized, but it has always been by level; either according to AR level or by Fountas and Pinnell guided reading level. But, after all the pd I received this summer, I knew I needed to do more.

Therefore, my goal when heading to school on Wednesday was to completely reorganize all if my books. I was kidding myself because I thought I would be able to finish the whole project in a few hours.

Here are a couple of before pictures. I obviously had a lot of work to do.

After sorting through my books, I came up with the following categories:

* Genres - general fiction, realistic fiction, historical fiction, folktales, fairy tales, legends, tall tales, poetry, biographies, mysteries, science content, social studies content, math content
* Author studies
* Novel sets
* Leveled Library

Here is the final product. (I included a lot of pictures.)

Entire library

Novel Sets

Content Area books - science, social studies, math

Leveled Library

Genres and Author Studies