So, I used my own simplistic, kid-friendly library labels to organize my bookshelves. I wouldn’t expect my third graders to shop for books based on author’s last name without a search engine equipped with the Dewey Decimal System or something similar (and I’m DEFINITELY not implementing that in my classroom anytime soon). I teach third grade, and we still need help navigating a library. You might have been using bins to organize your library for decades… great! I’m here to share my logic and maybe inspire you to reconsider yours. Now, I know every classroom, every teacher, and every student is different (I make that disclaimer on every post I make), so bins might actually work well in your classroom. I loved that my students were feeding off of each other for book recommendations and eyeballing what others were reading, but there were some really good books being overlooked in those dusty bins! Organizing my classroom library without bins makes it easier for students to explore all of the books I have to offer without having to sift through an overlooked or unloved bin.Īnother reason I decided to de-bin ( that’s a word now) was actually due to necessity! I overheard a student say something along the lines of “I want to book shop but it’s hard to see what’s in the bins.” BINGO - BYE, BINS! I ditched the bins for a few reasons…įirst of all, I noticed many bins were gathering dust, while the same bins were continuously empty due to popularity. I posted about this on Instagram, you can see it here. After seeing how much my students loved browsing the shelves in our school’s media center, I quickly decided I wanted to embrace a “bin-free” library. Two years ago I decided to “ditch the bins” and seek a different form of classroom library organization. It’s safe to say that I am obsessed with having an organized library tailored to my students’ wants and needs. In my opinion, the library is the most important part of any classroom. A Tutorial on Adding a Voice Recording to Your QR.It makes it easy for my students to find books that they like and they can also quickly put back the books they are retuning (books are labeled so that students know what bins to return them to). I have all of my library books in bins and they are organized by favorite authors, popular book series, and genre. This ensures that students can quickly and easily find books that they're interested in. I could also see this working as a class job.Īnother thing that helps this system out is by having an organized classroom library.
If they wanted to keep all their books, they would just come and let me know and I would keep their old photo.īecause I only had a few students shopping each day, it was totally manageable. If a kid wanted to keep one of the same books and get a few new ones the following week, they would just choose their new books and come to get their picture taken as normal. This system allowed me to see who had what book and monitor what was checked out. It took me forever to get my entire class library uploaded into that database.Įven if I was in the middle of something, it took less than 5 seconds for me to snap their photo and delete their picture from the previous week. It was also time consuming for students and the setup was SUPER time consuming for me. I could also figure out who the missing book on the floor belonged to when nobody in the class would claim it lol.Īlthough this system worked well for me, my students did sometime run into issues where they couldn't find a book they were checking out in the system. This was good because I could see what books I had on hand as well as who had a book checked out if I wanted to use it for a lesson. Students would log into their account and check books out. All I needed to do was scan the barcode on each book.
What I liked about using this site was I had an inventory of ALL my books. Now that it's been around awhile, I'm sure it is much more user friendly and easy to use. When I first used it back in 2012, it was really new. The second best system that I had was when I used Classroom Booksource. Not to mention, it was just too much of a headache to constantly monitor (especially that returned column). I also tried having them fill out a class library log, but only a handful of students filled it out consistently and accurately.
One of the classic systems, placing a shelf maker in the spot you borrowed a book from did not work for me because I wanted my students checking multiple books out at one time. Traditional class library checkout systems didn't work for me for various reasons.
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