Beliefs and Understandings Concepts

Methods
Guided Reading - students read at their level or an appropriate level for them, uses leveled texts, begins teacher-directed then pushes student toward independence, teaches comprehension, story structure, and phonics skills, small group, groups based on reading levels and reading needs.

Reading Workshop - Freedom, student choice, mini-lesson (10-15), independent practice (30 - 40), sharing (10-15), Mini-lessons focus on one thing taught explicitly, mini-lessons: management, reading skills, "literacy gossip" - why do authors do things they way they do?, teacher is conferencing with students during independent reading time to discuss how they are progressing as readers and monitoring individual progress, sharing allows for reteaching and to hear information in another voice / vocabulary.

Writer's Workshop - EXPLICIT (you show them exactly how you want them to do it), mini-lesson (10-15), independent practice (30 - 40), sharing (10-15), freedom, choice, mini-lessons: management, skills, writer's craft, teacher conferencing, conferences focus on ideas and how they are progressing as writers, sharing allows for reteaching and to hear information in another voice / vocabulary.

Working with Words - deals with teaching letters, their sounds, and combinations of
letters and sounds, using word walls, name brand phonics, cloze activities (find the missing word), making words / word building, WORDO, explicit embedded into other activities, subjects, etc.

Concepts
Strategy Instruction - Why spend time on strategy instruction? Why is this important?
Connections and Background - making a personal / text / world connection / response to the text
Questioning - answering questions through reading, using reading to evoke more questions
Visualizing - creating pictures of events in your head based on what is being read / understood, etc.
Determining Importance - what is the most important idea in the text?
Summarizing and Synthesizing - putting into your own words what was said in the text, paraphrasing what was said in the text, putting pieces of information together to make something new.

Critical Literacy - rethinking our ideas of what text is (happy meal toy), analyzing texts to understand how and why they work.
Fluency - poems as a way of instruction, kiddos read with a regular pace and rhythm, intonation, sight words (kids who know more sight words tend to be more fluent readers).
Informational Texts - books that convey factual information - how do we engage readers in these texts?
Visual Literacy - using images as text.
Book Clubs - groups of children reading a common text and engaged in discussions around that text.
Literacy Centers - spaces where children are engaged in activities independently that allow them to practice literacy concepts. Usually used when teachers are engaged in guided reading practice.
Technology - where does it make sense for kids to use technology in the classroom?

Summarizing and Sythesizing

Text Set: Summarizing and Synthesizing

Going to School in India by Lisa Heydlauff, Nitin Upadyhe, and Global Fund For Children



Summary of the book: This is a children's book that talks about what it would be like to go to school in India. There is information in the book from how the students get to school to what they learn while they are at school. There are individual sections of the book that focus on different children who give information about what school is like for them in India. There are real photographs of students in India as well as pictures to show what the schools in India look like.
Classroom Connection: This book would be great for teaching students how to summarize and synthesizing because it has enough information to be useful in both areas. For summarizing, students could read a page and then summarize it in a few short sentences to prove that they understand what is happening in the book. Synthesizing can be taught in this book because it takes information that students already know and builds on that knowledge. Students know what it is like to go to school but they do not know how that is different from the students that go to school in India. A teacher could have students make a chart for this book about what they already knew, what they found interesting, and what they learned from the book. This activity would allow students to practice synthesizing with the use of this book.










What If You Met A Pirate? by Jan Adkins




Summary of book: This book is all about things that would happen if you met a pirate. The book describes what it is that people think pirates look and act like but then it talks about what pirates are really like. Facts are included in this book about what pirates are like at every age.
Classroom connection: This book would be best for synthesizing because it talks about a topic that is familiar to children and then explains the myths behind pirates. Students would be able to take what they know about pirates and turn their opinions around based on facts learned from the book.

Global Warming: The Threat of Earth's Changing Climate by Laurence Pringle

Summary of book: This book is an unformational text about global warming. It talks about the threat of global warming and educates readers on the impact global warming is having on our Earth.
Classroom Connection: This text could be used in the classroom to practice summarizing because it is a topic that students may not know much about just yet. It would be a good tool to read and summarize the information that comes from the book. By reading each page and then summarizing what was read or reading the entire book and summarizing it in paragraph form at the end would be helpful for students to develop the skills to summarize information.

Text Set: Summarizing and Synthesizing

Dungy, T. You Can Do It! (2008). New York: Little Simon Inspirations.

Tony Dungy, former NFL player and current head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, wrote this book on fulfilling your dreams. The book is about a young boy named Linden whose family and big brother Tony help him to discover his passion. After realizing that he loves to make people smile, he prayed that God would help him discover what he wanted to do when he grew up. After visiting the dentist in order to fix a terrible tooth ache he felt extremely happy. He knew he could make people laugh with his jokes and imitations, but he never realized that something like being a dentist also made people smile. Going to the dentist sparked his dream and he continued to question the dentist on his career. After leaving the dentists office he was sure that he had discovered his “it.” His new found dream was to become a dentist. Because he had the support of his loving family and God, he knew he could do it.

Strategy Connection: This book would be a very good book for students learning how to summarize. They could summarize the book and then write notes and reactions on the side. From their notes and reactions, they could use the summarization in order to create their own story about what they want to do when they grow up. This would be a very fun book to summarize, and the meaning and moral behind it is great.

Falconer, I. Olivia Helps with Christmas. (2006). New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers.

This book was about a family of pigs and their Christmas Eve journey. The piglets, filled with anxiousness, helped their parents to prepare for Christmas morning. Waiting, hour by hour, for Santa to get there they kept busy by preparing food, decorating the tree, untangling the lights, setting the table, putting out treats for Santa, and singing Christmas Carols. Finally, after a restless night, Santa came and the piglets were filled with joy and surprise at the presents that lay under the tree. The piglets opened their presents with great excitement and rushed to try them all out. The youngest baby even learned how to walk in order to get to her presents sooner. After an exhausting day, Olivia fell straight asleep only to be filled with big dreams again.

Strategy Connection: This book would be a great holiday book that could be used in a young class to introduce the idea of summarization. It is a simple read, so it would be easy for the children to summarize. You could have students read in groups of two or three, or read it to the entire class, and as a large group come up with ideas about the summarization of the story.

Curtis, J.L. & Cornell, L. Big Words for Little People. (2008). New York: Joanna Cotler Books.

This book has clever rhymes and riddles that put large words into context in a child’s life in order to teach the definition and spelling of big words. It is a clever and witty approach to learning.

Strategy Connection: This book is perfect to use when teaching children how to summarize and synthesize. Students can read through the book and summarize. In the summarization of the book, the "big words" should be picked out of the text, summarizing the meaning. In this way, students will be creating a word list. From this summarization, the definition and spelling of "big words" can be learned. An alternate definition may then be synthesized from the summarization, creating a deeper, lasting meaning.

Text Set: Synthesizing & Summerizing

Smith, L. John, Paul, George & Ben


The book John, Paul, George and Ben is a great book to read during a subject about four historical people. This book takes the four people and tells a story about how they were when they were children. The way that the children act as a child are looked down on by the other people, but those same actions become benefited when they become older and make historical actions in history. This book is a fun way to learn about important people in history. Also in the back of the book there are true and false questions that can help the student reading the book do his or her own assessment of what they read. Also at the end of the book are facts about the four people which can help the student learn even more historical facts.

Strategy Connection: This book would be great to use when asking the students to summarize or synthesize. The students can read this book and summarize what they read, learned and what they already knew about the people in the book. This is a great book for synthesizing because they can take what they already knew and add it to what they learned to help them understand what they learned in the book. Also because of the true false quiz in the back students are able to review and help them summarize the important facts they learned in the book.

Climo, S. King of the Birds

This book is a great way for students to learn about birds and also have fun while reading. This book talks about how birds act and what different types of birds there are. While the book is giving facts it is also telling a story. The book goes through different birds and talks about why that bird thinks they should be king. Each bird tells what characteristics they have that would make them a good king.

Strategy Connection: this is a good book to use for synthesizing because the student can write down what they are learning while also thinking about what they already knew about some of the birds from the book. So while students are synthesizing they can think about what they are learning while tying that to facts they may have already new.


Kramer, S. Hidden Worlds

This book is a factual book about looking at different objects though a microscope. The book goes through different animals and objects and asks the students what it would be like if you were so small you could look at those things up close. The book also is great for learning because it gives info on what the object you are looking at, making the student think by asking questions and showing the students pictures of things they have never seen before.

Strategy Connection: This is a great book because it gives great information. Students can use this book to summarize what they learned. Students can read this book and put post it notes on pages where they learned something new and also in places that they have questions. So this book can be used to summarize and also synthesize by having the students connect what they see to what they thought it looked like without looking though the microscope.

Sight Words and Name Brand Phonics

We recently talked about fluency and the role of sight words in developing fluency for elementary students. Research ascertains that kiddos who know a lot of words automatically read in ways that are smoother, understand more of what they read, and succeed more (although it is never really stated what that last one means) than kiddos who are not fluent readers. Here are some resources I've used from the web that will help you think about ways to use sight words in your classroom:

Sight Word From Ms. Ross's Class :: Lots of information about sight words here, including flashcards, word lists and connections to additional web resources.

Mrs. Perkins' Dolch Resources :: Sight words are also sometimes called Dolch words. This site contains a similar array of resources, definitely worth looking through.

Zwolle Elementary Sight Word Fun :: Some of the links are dead, but it's a good collection of sight word resources as well.

Here's another site that features Name Brand Phonics lessons: 4 Block Literacy. There is a ton on this page, so take a few moments to look through and download freely!

Determining Importance

How A Book Is Published by Bobbie Kalman

Summary- This book offers children a brief overview of how books are published. It begins with developing ideas as an author then brainstorming and organizing concepts. It also discusses the behind the scenes actions that a network of people collaborate to build in order to put together each individual piece of the book. Finding primary and secondary sources, organizing pictures, as well as rewritting and proof reading the text are important parts of the process. This book also offers advice to young authors for their own intents on book writting.

Strategy Connection- How A Book Is Published includes picture sources as well as text boxes to help capture readers attention and focus their thoughts. It also provides a glossary in the back of the book for bold faced words which are present throughout the text. The glossary helps to clarify confusing or unfamiliar words which may hinder readers progress while moving through the book.

Marine Mammal Preservation by Peggy Thomas

Summary- This book provides a background and brief information on marine mammals. It offers pictures and other ways for identifying and sorting out the wide selection of marine mammals. Also included in the text are important ways to help save these special animals by making readers aware of the reality that is occuring and will continue if things do not change.

Strategy Connection- Marine Mammal Preservation includes a wide selection of labeled pictures which allow readers to connect written text to a visual source. Also provided are text boxes under the pictures which allow a brief and simple summary of key points the author wants to get acrossed. The titles of each chapter are cast in a bright and vibrant color to attract the readers attention and point out the headings of each chapter and giving some insight into what the future chapter will be about. Also, a glossary is included in the back of the book allowing readers a source to look up confusing words in order to enhance their reading opportunites.

America A Patriotic Primer by Lynne Cheney

Summary- This book uses an alphabetic approach to categorize and simplify each of the major milestones in American history. It uses simple language for young readers and fun pictures to illustrate concepts and enguage readers of all ages. Each letter stands for an important event or major word which tie into both the past and future of our country.

Strategy Connection- Creative pictures and maps illustrate the important ideas for young readers who may not be able to understand much written text. Various types of fonts keep readers attention focused and allow for new things to expect as the readers follows along. Each page is slightly different to create a sense of excitement and fun.

Grimes, Nikki. A Pocketful of Poems

This book is a collection of short poems. These poems are all inspired by one single word and typically discuss how it makes the author

 feel.  For instance, there is a poem written on the word "homer." The poem discusses the time of year when children play baseball or softball. The poem describes the way the author feels about this season and how she looks forward to hitting one last homer.

Strategy Connection: This book, like many other poetry books, can be used to work on visualization, because of the many descriptive words found in poems. Children can not only visualize how the poem makes them feel, what is happening in them, or use them as a template to write their own descriptive poems.  This story contains fun pictures or backgrounds that go to each poem. The children can use these to create their own idea of what is happening as well.

Day, Alexandra. Good Dog Carl

This story is a picture book, about a baby who is left with a Labrador Retriever while his parents go out. The book visually tells the story of all the events that go on while the dog is in charge and how the dog takes are of all the problems that arise while the parents are away.

Strategy Connection: This story is really good for helping children learn to visualize. In the case of Good Dog Carl, there are no words, so the children have to focus on pictures in order to follow what is happening in this story. The pages tend to skip scenes at times, and this helps children learn  to create a video in their minds of what is happening in between pages. Teachers could do activities with children on drawing a picture that would fit in between two pages in the book. The children could also design a picture and talk about what is happening in their picture to give the teacher an idea of what they understand is happening in the story.

Miller, Sara S.  Three Stories You Can Read to Your Cat

This is a book that contains three short stories about why it is that

cats sleep so much. For any young girl or boy who adore their cats, this

book is perfect. It is full of adventures and explanations of what is going

through a cat's mind during the day.

Strategy Connection: Because this book is packed with adventure,

children can mentally make their own movie in their minds about what is

happening to these cats, or what it would be like if their cat were in the story.

Children acan make connections by reading this story and thinking of times

where their cat has acted the same way. This helps kids be creative about what

is going on inside cats' minds, because we will never really know what they are

thinking.

Determining Importance

Krull, Kathleen. Supermarket

Summary- this nonfiction story book has wonderful illustrations and is a great learning tool for young children. This story is about a girl and her mother and their trip to the grocery store. The main themes of the story include how does all the food get to the shelves? How do stores keep them fresh? It talks about how all the food is stored and where. It also addresses the shipping process and how the food gets delivered to the store. In the story there is even an illustration of the food pyramid.

Strategy Connection- To help students determine importance in this nonfiction text they should notice several tools in the book that will aid them in this process. There are certain diagrams on the top and bottom of pages that discuss nutrition facts and historical information. Some of the fonts are written in different ways so this may be something that they should pay extra attention to. The book also has a whole page dedicated to the food pyramid with very good visuals. This would for sure be something that is important to the book.

Manning, Mick and Granstrom, Brita. Voices of the Rainforest

Summary- This book tells a child all they need to know about a rainforest. The story is being told by two characters that are from the rainforest. First they introduce the rainforest and what it is then they explain where rainforests can exist. The book talks about what kind of animals live in the rainforest and it explains that some people even live in the rainforest. It even illustrates amazing pictures that describes how the planets make their own food. They Amazon River is brought up along with interesting facts about how long it is and how it is the biggest river in the world! What I liked the most about the book is that in the end it talked about what fruits and supplies we use from the rainforest like brazil nuts, bananas, and pineapple. Also in the end the book dedicates two pages of crafts a child could do that relate to the many aspects of a rainforest.

Strategy Connection- In the begining of this book it has a table of contents that a child could easily use in order to find topics quicker. The different type of fonts say alot about what facts are the most important and this book does a great job of differentiating those. There are maps and excellent visuals that would help children pick out the important detials. There is also an index in the back of the book that has important words from the story in it.When there is a new topic discussed it is printed in bigger letters and this would let the child know that this was probably the imprtant theme in that topic.

Burnie, David. Endangered Planet

Summary- This book informs students how to take care of their environment. It teaches students simple ways of how they can save the environment. It is about teaching students how important our surroundings are to our life. It informs students about pollution and how to minimze it. It discusses techniques to preserving the wildlife and saving energy. It links important concepts such as population growth and growing food. It has real life visuals that aid in the understanding of the book. It teaches students good ways of recycling and the reuse of materials and how important it is for our habitat. I also like at the end how the book addresses our future and what is in store for us.

Strategy Connection- This nonfiction book is broken down into three chapters that is outlined in the begining in the table of contents. In each chapter there are diagrams that have descriptions underneath. These charts help point out the important information in each chapter. In places necessary there are maps provided to give the readers more of an idea of the place they are describing. There are arrow bullets points within the text that signal important information. In the back of the book they have a glossary that students can conviently flip to when they do not know what a word means. The book contains awesome photos of real life situations. In the back there also contains an index that will help students when trying to determine whats important.

Parish, P. Amelia Bedelia.

Amelia Bedelia begins her first day of work as a maid. Her boss leaves her a list of chores to complete that include changing the towels, dusting the furniture, drawing the drapes, and dressing the chicken. Amelia does not understand these instructions, and takes them literally. As a result, she actually puts dust powder on the furniture, and clothing on the chicken. This book is full of adventure and as Amelia discovers how words can have more than one meaning.

Strategy Connection- This book allows children to discover the meaning of the strategy inferring. Students are able to discover through Amelia’s mistakes that words can have more than one meaning, so it is important to look at the context clues and the tone. In order to understand Amelia’s mistakes they will have to read more than just the words; instead they will have to apply background knowledge and use text clues in order to infer the words meaning. As a result, this book shows students the importance of inference, for it helps in understanding a context’s meaning.

Brumbeu, J., De Marcken, G. The Quiltmaker’s Gift.

The Quiltmaker sews the most beautiful quilts in the world, and then gives them away to the poor, refusing to sell any quilts to the rich. The greedy King of the land demands the Quiltmaker give him a quilt, hoping it will make him happy. The Quiltmaker agrees to give the King a quilt as long as he gives away everything he owns. The king begins to realize that happiness could not be bought or found in materialistic objects. The King sees true happiness is in giving to others.

Strategy Connection- This book allows children to discover the meaning of the strategy visualizing. The book is filled with a vivid text that can allow students to create mental images. The author uses many descriptive words and metaphors to allow readers to get a sense of feeling that they are ‘almost there’. As a result this book can be used to show students that they can create pictures in their head as they read. The text is so well written that students can create mental images of the story before actually looking at the illustrations. Additionally, the illustrations in the book are very detailed, depicting the story line, actions, and emotions. The pictures could be used without the words, and the students could make predictions about the story line. Overall, this is a great book to teach students visualizing whether you use the author’s vivid text, or detailed illustrations.

Curtis, J.L. Today I Feel Silly.

The young girl in the story experiences many different emotions and what these emotions feel like. Some of the emotions include silly, angry, joyful, confused, and quiet. The book is filled with pictures to help children identify their changing moods. Additionally, there is a face at the end of the book that the child can play with and change to make it appear happy, angry, sad, etc.

Strategy Connection: The book allows children to understand the meaning of inferring. The books illustrations force students to read more than just the words; students learn to look at the characters faces, body language, and expressions. Students may be able to use their background knowledge of emotions to relate to this book, and how the character feels as her mood changes. As a result students learn how to gain greater insight and meaning of the text: by creating a connection from using background knowledge.

Half a World Away
Gleeson, L.

This book is about two friends named Amy and Louie. Amy and Louie would do everything together including building towers high in the sky, digging holes, and watching clouds. When they wanted to play they would call each other over with “Coo-ee, Lou-ee” or “Coo-ee, Am-ee.” One day Amy and her family moved a long way away to the other side of the world. Amy and Louie both stopped doing the activities that they normally did. They both missed each other very much. Louie asked everyone in his family if he called Amy really loud would she be able to hear him. His family explained to Louie that Amy was too far away. One day Louie called for Amy really loud when she was sleeping. When Amy had woken she described that she had a dream that Louie had called for her. This book is about true friends who care about each other greatly.

Strategy connection:
This book is great for inferring readers. The reader is able to relate to how the characters in the book are feeling when they miss each other. The reader is able to read the characters face, body language and expressions to understand what the characters are experiencing. The reader is able to use the cover and pictures to infer what is going on in the story. The cover shows Amy and Louie standing on different sides of a tree, which Louie’s side being night time and Amy’s side being daytime. The reader is able to infer that two characters are far away from each other. The pictures in the story help the reader visualize what is going on and able to infer meaning of the story. The reader is able to create movies in the mind by creating their own personal mental images that only belong to the reader. Some readers may be able to make a personal connection with the reading if they have had a friend move away from them. This book is great for the students to be able to visualize and infer how Amy and Louie are feeling.

What Do You See?
Domanska, J.

This book is describing how different animals view the world. It is giving details of a variety of animal’s perspectives of details how they see the world. This book has a lot of pictures that do not have words on them for the reader to visualize how the animal sees the world. Some animals are describing the world they see as dark, wet, dry, clear and green. The story ends with the lark that is flying above all the animals, sees that all the animals are all partially correct with what they see.

Strategy connection:
This book is wonderful for students to visualize how each animal is viewing the world. This reading can support how the reader understands the text. The reader is able to visualize each animals world which strengthens the reader’s inferential thinking. The reader is able to infer what the words mean by the pictures in the story. The reader is viewing expressions of the animals and understanding the tone of the text as well. This is helping the reader relate to how the animals are feeling in the story. The reader is able to use word clues to uncover what is going on in the story. For example, the frog says “the world is wet.” There is then a picture of frogs dancing in the water with an umbrella. The reader is able to uncover how the frog views the world from it’s perspective. This book is very beneficial for both visualizing and inferring when a reader is reading this story.

Spot A Dog
Micklethwait, L.

This book has the reader visualize different types of dogs on each page. On each page there is a sentence about a dog and than an art picture on the next page about that specific dog. The reader is asked to find the dog on each page, in some pictures the dog is very difficult to find and forces the reader to look hard for the dog. There are a lot of descriptive words describing different types of dogs. There are a variety of different pictures that depict many different unique types of art.

Strategy connection:

This is a great book for the reader to visualize the art pictures to find a dog. It increases the attention of the reader when they are looking for the dog. The reader is able to learn many different adjectives that are describing dogs and then are able to visualize what the specific dog looks like in the picture. This book also has the reader do a lot of inferring while reading the book. The reader has to read more than just words when looking for the dog. They have to infer from the picture where they think the dog would be. This book helps the reader find meaning of unfamiliar words when they read the descriptive word of the dog and then look for the dog in the picture. This book also allows the reader to use word clues to uncover what is going on in the picture. All of these strategies in this book will help the reader with visualizing and inferring when reading.

Devon Mundy

Classroom Libraries

So I've been building this blog post for a while now, attempting to collect pictures and stories from my friends who still teach to show you examples of classroom organization of books. It's interesting that the more people I talk to, the more I realize there are many similarities in how we have organized our collections. This could be because I tend to seek out teachers who share the same philosophies I possess or perhaps because our organization methods are just that good. I'm kind of hoping it's the latter.

Before we talk about organizing the physical texts, let's address how to obtain them. I had been a children's book collector for years, so I had several boxes of books to move into my classroom when I began, but I realize not everyone wants to collect children's books (relatives do begin to give you strange looks when you request the latest Kevin Henkes for your 18th birthday) and books are expensive! So what to do?

My thoughts:

1. Make friends with your local library. In Bloomington, we are fortunate to have the Monroe County Library Friends of the Library Bookstore. When the librarians take books out of circulation, they send them to the bookstore to be sold. This means the books have been well-loved, but you can obtain a hardcover of superior library-grade quality for a mere dollar. They tend to have a decent selection most of the time - I have walked out with armfuls of books one visit and nothing the next - and the books come fitted with snot guards already. (Snot guards are what my kiddos called the plastic wrapping libraries put on the books to protect them while being enjoyed.) They are open on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday - for hours, check their website. It's a great way to get good books into your classroom while supporting the local library.

Other civic institutions also have books sales throughout the year, including the Red Cross. I've never been to the Red Cross books sale, but I hear it is amazing.

2. Book orders are a pain in the rump. Collecting money, making sure you don't lose the money, tallying up orders, sorting the orders once they come in: it all takes time, time that is valuable and could be spent doing other things, like lesson planning or reading a book yourself. There are the upsides, though: book orders provide low-cost books to your kiddos and their families and they also award you, the teacher, points for doing all the work. These points accumulate and can be redeemed for books in the book order, classroom supplies and other various goodies. Keep in mind that anything non-book takes what seems like forever to collect enough points for, but I found myself spending them on guided reading book sets and big books quite a bit. The big book club (the PC name for book orders) is Scholastic. When you get your first classroom, sign up.

3. Think alternatively. These are some other methods through which I have procurred books for my classroom: I had a lot of dietary restrictions in my room, meaning that regardless of what the caregivers sent in, not all of my kiddos would be able to enjoy the treat. At the beginning of the school year, I sent home a note explaining that due to the diets of my kiddos, I would not be able to have treats in the classroom but they were encouraged to send in a book in honor of their child's birthday. I would read the book to the class on their child's birthday, place a special sticker in the book to designate that it was donated for their child's birthday and place their birthday picture in the book as well. For kiddos who did not come to school with birthday books, I kept a stash of them in my desk drawer, purchased with those bonus points I referred to earlier.

I sent home another note right before Thanksgiving, asking caregivers to think about donating supplies or texts to the classroom rather than buying a present for me, if they were thinking this way at all. While I appreciate them, there can only be so many #1 Teacher mugs in my cupboard and if the teacher across the hall has the same mug, one of us has to be number two. I found that parents appreciated a list of things needed in the classroom - it was more helpful to them to buy something that would be used by all the kids rather than just myself. On the day before break, individual kiddos would open up their presents and show the class new glue sticks, glitter gel, and books.

Okay, so there are some options to persue when bringing books into your classroom. Be picky - don't let just anything in. Use your resources wisely as you only have so much space and so much time. This is the first thing I notice about the classroom libraries of my friends: we don't just let anything into our classroom.

Organizing the books in your room is a matter of personal taste. You want think about several things when putting together your system:

* How will student use the books?
* How will they keep them - in their desks, in their book bins?
* What can you get away with in your physical space?
* What will be best for instruction?
* What materials do I have to organize them with? (Baskets, bins, etc.)

For myself, I put my books in groups based on several factors: author studies, topics, genres, series and favorite characters. I found my kiddos were overwhelmed, as was I, by the sheer amount of books in my classroom. I began to rotate the books through the library - one the first school day of the month, I would introduce the new book bins (Sterilite baskets I bought at Target) and we would look at the contents. It kept them excited about the classroom library and ensured they would not be bored. It also reduced the amount of books in the classroom kids and had to manage. If a child took a particular shine to a book and the end of the month was approaching, I would allow them to hold onto it. I'm not that mean.

Students would select books in the morning while getting their backpacks taken care of, before starting writer's workshop. My kiddos worked with book bins, cheap magazine files I bought at IKEA. On the first day of school, they decorated the outsides of them and got to take them home at the end of the year. The rule was they needed to keep eight books in their bins at all times: three leveled texts and five enjoyment texts.

Which brings me to another point: I had multiple libraries in my classroom. The above described the general classroom library. I also had a guided reading leveled library, collections of single-titled leveled books, for students to access, as well as a teacher-only library filled with anchor books for writing and reading lessons. I moved to the teacher-only library after never being able to find my anchor texts in the general library or having to take them from a kiddo who was enjoying them.

This is a lot of information on classroom libraries and doesn't begin to cover it all. Since my fingers are beginning to hurt from writing, here are some links to explore:

Mandy's Classroom Library

Tips for Organizing and Managing Your Classroom Library

ProTeacher Discussion Thread on Library Organization

Scholastic: Creating Your Classroom Library

Happy Internet surfing!