Taming the Beast

And by beast, I mean my classroom library.

I am very blessed to have people in my life who are so willing to help me out as I begin my teaching career. One of those people is my aunt, who, upon moving into an administrative position in her school district after 30+ years of teaching, has generously passed down to me an abundance of resources, including hundreds and hundreds of children's books. And I mean literally, hundreds. I am unbelievably grateful that I have such a great start to my classroom library, but it is crazy overwhelming to just look at the mass quantity of books in my possession, let alone to go and ORGANIZE them. After several different attempts (and lots of pulled hair later), I stumbled upon these super cute Classroom Library Bin Labels off Teachers Pay Teachers. I can't begin to explain how excited this OCD, organization-lovin' girl was when I printed these bad boys out, spread them out on the floor of my grandparents vacated basement apartment-turned-storage unit, and started going through box after box of books.

I ended up creating some categories of my own, but having the bulk of the categories set was very helpful for me. After going through all the books, I realized that some of the categories only had a couple of books in them, while others had probably 40. I ended up going through and combining some categories or narrowing others. In the end, I narrowed it down to 30 bins for my topics and some popular authors and then put the books that were part of a series just on a shelf. I bought some plain clear plastic bins from Target, attached the Bin Labels, and put them on the fabulous bookshelves my dad made me. I numbered each of the bins, then put a sticker with the corresponding number on the inside back cover of each book so that my kiddos can (hopefully) easily put them back in the right spot. Here's the finished product!

This was quite the undertaking, but I'm pretty pleased with the outcome. I think having it organized by category will help my kiddos find books they are interested in. How is your classroom library organized?