How do I organize my library?

I have to say that I am incredibly lucky. I got the largest classroom (minus the gym) to call my own. I have the luxury of 6 student computers to make the yearbook and to use as a mini-lab for writing. And I still have a complete classroom desk area surrounded by books. My classroom library has over 1,300 books. This has not come easily. It has taken hard work curating a library of books to create my curriculum. You see, I have no textbooks. I teach all levels of high school English at my rural school- 5 whole classes. My library is my curriculum. Besides my students, it's the most important thing in the room.

How do I organize my books so that we can find them?

I use a simple genre system. I switched to book bins, sorted by genre, last year because it seemed a great way to get my students to really take a look at books. I've found that if I put my book on the shelf, spines out, that students don't really look at the books, their eyes simply pass them. Think judging a book by its cover is bad? My students were judging it by the spine. I don't have enough room to put them all covers out, so book bins work a lot better.

My students can pull out a book bin and actually interact with the books. They see the covers, they feel the pages as they flip from book to book. They are now much more likely to physically hand books to each other with these book bins. They take one or two and gather around them in groups and hand books back and forth. They make recommendations to each other. More books get checked out and the students are much more involved in seeking out books.

I do not put the books in any specific order in the genre bins. My students never worry about putting a book in just the right place which means they re-shelve a book they've decided they don't want much more often than before. I don't put the genre bins themselves in any particular order except to keep like bins together. As my library grows and changes, it's much easier to move around individually labeled bins when I run out of space than it was to re-label shelves in my system before. And the biggest benefit? I can fit more books on my shelves!

I buy the bins for $1 at my local Dollar Tree when I can find them. They don't always have them (and I haven't found them on their website) so I buy a lot every time I find them.

But Mrs. Folkman, you're out of space!

Yes, and this year is the first time I'm really going to need to cull the shelves really well. I have an idea for that which I'll share next week when I start that project. Stay tuned.

How Do You Pick Books with Limited Funds?

Another way I help generate interest in books, especially new books, is that I involve my students in selecting the new books for our room. Each day on my SmartBoard presentation for my classes, I include books or authors in some way. Because I have this presentation, it's easy to include a few slides that have prospective books on them, give a quick summary and ask students to rate them. So here's how it works.

1. I select some sort of book list to present to the class. I started with Becky Anderson's recommended books for teens from the  Illinois Reading Council Conference and Anderson's Bookshops. I get a new list each year at the conference and it's a great starting point. I've also used lists from Book Riot or from browsing Pinterest.

2. I honestly just go in order from the list and select 3 books per day. I put a picture of the book cover on my presentation. Each class period I show them the 3 slides with the 3 books and give a quick summary. For example...

"Red Queen is about a world where people can have red or silver blood. If you're red, you're common. If you're silver, you're royalty and have some sort of magic. However, our protagonist has red blood AND magic. It's discovered and the royal family decides to hide her to keep her safe. But there's a growing rebellion of Reds. Where will the protagonist's loyalties lie?"

So how do I decide what to say about books I don't have in my classroom and that I haven't read? I read the Amazon blurb and put it into my own words. Sometimes this works great, and sometimes it is horrible. Some of those are really awfully written and you can't get a good feel for the book. Mostly, however, it works out.  

I try to hide my own interest or disinterest in a book because I want the students to give me their own opinions, but I'm sure it seeps through sometimes. 

3. As I'm telling my students the summary, I've asked them to rate the book on a 1-5 scale on a little piece of paper I've given them. It's pretty simple. I ask them to put the title (or an abbreviation thereof) and choose a number with 1 being uninterested and 5 being very interested. My students like to be funny and put very long decimals sometimes or even write mathematical equations for me to solve. I enjoy this. (I round the decimals, if you wanted to know.)

4. After I've collected the slips of paper (and I literally just use scraps. Papers discarded in the recycling bin. Junk mail. Old DOL slips from when I used to do those. Whatever I can find with a blank side.) I take about 2-3 minutes to sort them during my prep. I want some very simple data. How many kids rated the book a 5, 4, or 3. I write that data in a notebook and recycle the slips. 

Why does this work?

My students hear about lots of stories (which is also great for their writing ideas!) They start talking to each other about books. When the book comes in later, they remember that we've already talked about it and now they're excited as soon as it comes in. The book will be in someone's hands within a day.

How do I display what books we're getting?

Using the data I've collected, I can determine which book is my next priority to purchase. I then have a small display at the front of the room. It simply has the next two books we're going to get, how much it costs, and how much money we've earned so far from Bing points. The top book, Playlist for the Dead has accumulated all $15 and has been ordered. The List will be next, but we only need $10 to buy that one.

How do you decide what books to buy for your room?

Get Books in Their Hands

Only about half of the books I acquired for my room over the summer.

 If you're like me, you spent your summer acquiring books for your classroom. I frequently scour my local thrifts stores, I do my daily Bing searches for points, I also simply end up buying books that I've been dying to read. And there are always a few books the school purchases for me-- that's how I always choose to use my "supply" budget from the school. If you teach secondary, you have a lot of classes and a lot of students. I teach 5 assigned courses and 2 independent courses this year. How do I let all of my students have a chance to check out the new books? Here's my solution.

I place the books (in this case I selected the most wait-list-worthy since I had too many) on the table in my room. I tape a sheet of paper underneath each of the books, labeled with the title. My students have time to peruse the titles between classes and even a few minutes during class. They can put their name on as many wait lists as they wish. Each day in each class, I discuss three of the books in class-- sort of a mini book advertisement/ book talk-- and after every class has heard about those three books, I make the actual wait list. This quick description of the books takes less than five minutes and gives the kids who might not look at the books the chance to get interested. And they do. For the wait-list, I randomize the names of those signed up so that my early classes don't always get an advantage. Each student gets one week with the book and can request to be put back on the bottom of the list if they don't finish the book in the allotted time. As you can see below, Cut Me Free is already called for until almost second semester!

This is my quick and simple solution for getting a lot of excitement generated for my new books each year. It also gives every student a chance to have access to them.

Coming up: How to choose books for the room

What is the Book Bubble?

I went to a small liberal arts college here in the Midwest called Millikin University. It was completely different from the town around it and people talked about the campus being the Milli-bubble. Inside the bubble was very academically focused. It was warm and inviting. Everywhere you looked, it was undoubtedly a college. You were surrounded by like-minded people. It was home away from home where you could learn, explore, attempt new things. When I think of my classroom, I want it to be like that bubble. I call mine the Book Bubble. I want students, teachers, administrators, and parents to walk into my room and know, undoubtedly, that it is an English room. I want books to be the first thing someone sees. I would not be offended if someone asked me if it were the school library. I want to fill my room with students who are book-minded. They don't always come to me that way, so I have to develop that. In this blog, I hope to explain how I attempt to make my own Book Bubble so that perhaps you can create yours, too.