Our School Library

After finding this haul of books at the local thrift shop, I decided it was high time I reorganize our little "library" of children's books and learning books.

My first job was to separate our books into piles by subject. James and Juliet helped. : )

Next, I used dot stickers to visual discriminate each subject. I couldn't find inexpensive dots in the variety of colors I needed, so I purchased some plain white dots and colored them with markers.

I created this legend to help James find what he needs. For example, for homework each night, James must read a book to his father. I tell him to go to the classroom and select any one of his readers, which are the green group. He knows where to get them and, most importantly, where to return them!

After a lot of thought, I decided to use one of the bookcases in our classroom. I know this seems like an obvious choice for school books, but I actually had a hard time giving up two of our Montessori shelves. That is, until I determined our new routine and realized we'll be using less of our shelves for tray work.

There are a couple of baskets to hold the smaller collections of books, such as our Nat Geo's for kids.

Our reference books (encyclopedias, dictionaries,etc.), my teaching books and manuals, and any other textbooks are on a bookcase just outside the classroom. James has lots of non-school type books and all of those are on the bookcase in his bedroom.

At the moment, I have no desire (read: energy) to catalog our all of books. I know there are a variety of awesome online resources that would help me do this, but our selection is still relatively small and quite manageable. :)

~Thank you for your comments!~