Celebrating Choice in the New Year

I'm celebrating NOT spending days setting up my classroom.  I'm looking forward to school starting next Wednesday and meeting my new group of learners.

I am excited to share my reading life with my new readers. It's fun to xerox some of the covers of the books I read this summer. The minute my new students arrive they will know their teacher is a reader. I also include a few personal photos of my reading life and favorite places I like to read. 

For years, I spent hours getting my library ready. Not anymore last year's class organized this library. Mixing all of the books up leaving serval hints about how this new class could organize it.  One of my favorite conversations:

•  "Do you have this book?"  
• I reply, "I sure do in the library"
• "Where in the library?"
• I reply, "I don't know."

Conversations above lead us into a class discussion about how do you want to organize the library?  Thanks to Ruth for encouraging us to celebrate. 

Watch out TORNADO approaching!

Every year our class has a tornado come through!  Every year in the middle of the tornado I think I will never do it again.  Every year at the end of the tornado I think “WOW” the students learn so much about our class library. So I do it again…………

The tornado begins during specials and I spread all the books over the floor.  The students come in and are shocked to see the floor.  Each student has a sheet on a clipboard to record any books that they might want to read.  I give each student an empty container and they start to walk around the room looking for books that may be similar.  (Hint: the day before we brainstorm all the ways that libraries are organized and we create a list)  The talk in the classroom is amazing-everyone helps everyone. They discuss favorite books, books they want to read, and better yet books they have never seen before so now they are curious.  Better yet they know where to find all those books because they set up the library!

The next step is to decorate a white index card for their tub which is fun and the students tend to take their tub personally because typically they are designing a tub that has one of their favorite books in it.

Original name cards for tubs

Finally the students organize our class library and decide how to group the tubs.  This year we have six sections:  author, series, genres, poetry, picture books, and topics.

Our author bookshelf.

This is one of those activities when the day is done I am exhausted but thrilled that the students were able to see all the books and be excited about reading. PRICELESS!