Classroom Library Redo! Part 1: Purging and Restocking Your Classroom Library

 This is part one of a two post series.  

I have always loved having a big class library. It has really  helped me create readers out of my most reluctant students. But, over the years I realized that I had been lazy and sort of let my library go.  It  really hit home when I went to a workshop by Donalyn Miller and read her book Reading in the Wild. Holy Moly! If you read it, be prepared to look at your class library with new eyes and be compelled to improve things! It was this quote that really made me rethink my library:

  ". . . remember why we build classroom libraries 

in the first place: so our students will fall in love with reading and find the right book at the right time. We cannot offer our students meaningful              book access with damaged, outdated, 

or uninteresting materials." (p. 86)

Yes, a lot of my library was MUSTIE.  MUSTIE is Donalyn's acronym for the six factors librarians use when removing books from their collections.   Essentially, MUSTIE asks if your books are Misleading (contain information that is no longer accurate), Ugly (torn, ripped, yellowed, etc,), Superseded (having older copies of books that are often updated), Trivial (books that don't engage most of your readers), Irrelevant (outdated, no longer popular), or can be found Elsewhere.  I really suggest you read her book, especially chapter 2: Curating a Classroom Library, where Donalyn goes in to much more detail.  Using the MUSTIE criteria, I did a huge purge of books in June, at the end of last school year.  I ended up pulling about 275 books.   These are just some.

Once I had all the books pulled, I let my students take home as many as they wanted.  Honestly, I had kids coming from classes I don't even teach asking for books.  Anyone that asked for a book got at least one. I even had kids taking books home for siblings. I realized this when one of my toughest boys was holding on to a fairy tale story book. When I asked and he explained it was for his little sister, I wanted to give him a huge hug.  Of course, I couldn't because that would totally have messed with his tough guy image! It was so great to send kids home with books they wanted to read over summer vacation.

I then spent the summer restocking. Books are everywhere! And, you don't have to spend a fortune to restock. You can go to a thrift store.  Thy always have a children's book section.  I went to library book sales and got these goodies below. Books at my local library run from $0.25 to $2.00.  I would say most of the books I purchased were about $0.50 each.  When buying used books, just keep in mind that it should look fairly new and be relevant to your readers.  Don't purchase more MUSTIE books to replace the MUSTIE books you've purged!

I ordered way too many books (That's not all of them by far!) from Amazon using points instead of cash.  This is great for getting newer, popular, and more current books.

(By the way, The One and Only Ivan?  I cried from the middle of the book to the end!  One of the best children's books I've read in a while.)

Finally, the last thing I did to restock my library was to go to the Scholastic Warehouse Book Sale where they had great deals.  There were dollar tables, and they offered Build a Box where you could stuff as many books in a box as possible for $25.  Th warehouse by me is having its next big sale in December.  I suggest clicking the link and seeing if there is a warehouse near you.

There are still many other sources for stocking your classroom library inexpensively:  

• Ask parents!  You can send a flyer home with an upper grade class asking parents if they would like to donate any books their child may have outgrown. If there aren't younger siblings at home, you will probably have parents happy to donate when they know it is helping their child's school.
• Facebook:  Many communities have online garage sales where people will post items they want to sell. Also, just putting the call out there on your personal page that you are seeking donations for your classroom library will often bring forward people who have books to give but just didn't think about it.  Of course, this works best when all your FB friends aren't teachers!
• Ebay.  When searching for books, don't just look for one particular book.  I find I get more results when searching in the children's book category for "book lot." This way you get auctions for several books that are generally on the same level instead of individual titles. A couple of years ago I had a student that refused to read anything. Flat out refused to read.  Finally, I was able to interst him in the Bone graphic novels.  He liked the first one and said he would like to read another. Our school library didn't have it, so I was able to go on Ebay and purchase several books in the series for a fraction of what they would have cost anywhere else.  It was money I was happy to part with because my friend ended up reading all the books!
• Craigslist:  I haven't used this myself for books, but I do see them listed.
• Scholastic has an article on Ten Easy Ways to Get Books for Your Classroom Library.  It's an older article and some ideas I've suggested, but there are some others that might work for you.
• Finally, this post from The Nerdy Book Club has lots of great ideas!

So, heading back to prep my room at the end of August with boxes of books turned in to quite a job! My library is sorted by level and by genre. Most of my books are leveled, even if they are not in a leveled basket.  One of the easiest ways I've found to do this is to mark the book level on the bottom of the book. It is not seen by all and then the book can be in the leveled baskets or the genre baskets. I have to say though that I am not a believer that a child should be tethered to certain books because of levels.  My students are allowed pick books that interest them. We use the reading levels more for guided reading instruction.  But, for this to work, you really need to be tuned in to what your friends are reading and how it is going.

This is posting on Tuesday morning.  After school this Tuesday afternoon I am planning to do a Periscope tour of my finished classroom library, sometime between 4-5 PM EST if you want to watch.  Connection is always a little sketchy in my classroom, but hopefully it will work and I can do the tour. The second post in this series is the Classroom Library Redo Part 2: Organization and Excitement!  This post will show you finished pictures of my library, how it is organized, my circulation procedures, and some extra tips on helping your students make the most of the library. If the Periscope tour works out, I will embed it in the post which should be up in a day or two at the longest.

Hopefully, you found this first part helpful.  Check back for part 2!
As always, thanks for reading!

What To Do With Your Extra Scholastic News Magazines

With six weeks of school left, I have started a major clean and purge kick this week.  One of the first things on my list was organizing the many Scholastic News magazines I have leftover from the year. I mean many.

Since I teach children of several different reading levels, I have subscriptions to grades 2, 3, and 4 Scholastic News.  Since I teach small groups, I tend to have lots and lots of leftovers!  Yes, I am revising my number of subscriptions for next year.  But, for this year, I had more than I could use. I sorted them all in a copy paper box by grade level, and then the question became what in the world can I do with them?  

Throwing them out is not an option.  Scholastic News is a great resource for informational articles that my friends love reading, and I love teaching with.  But, what to do with them all?  I figure I can't be the only one to have this lovely problem, so I sat down and brainstormed a list of different ways to make the most of those past dated magazines.

• Text Features Posters - Earlier last year, my friends made non-fiction text features posters.  I gave them a handful of old Scholastic News (SN) magazines, poster paper, and scissors.  Their task was to identify as many informational text features they could find.  They cut them out, pasted them on the poster and labeled each one, and wrote a sentence telling what it does.  In case you were wondering, given a handful of SN magazines, you will find pretty much every text feature imaginable.
• Centers - There are so many options for these in centers!
• 5Ws - Place a variety of SN mags in a folder with a 5W graphic organizer (who, what, where, when, why.)  Students can pick any article to read and complete the organizer.
• Vocab Search - There are always vocab boxes in SN.  Task your friends with creating a definition in their own words.  Then, they can locate and then write down the sentence in which the word is used.  Next, they can write their own sentence using the word in context correctly and create an illustration for this.  This can all happen on one sheet of paper!
• Grammar Hunts - Stack some newspapers with a bucket of highlighters and a task card that has your friends highlight (for example) 5 nouns in yellow, 5 verbs in blue, 3 pronouns, 4 adjectives, etc.  You get the idea. If you have been working on prefixes and suffixes, you could create a task card that has them hunt for that. For younger kids, you could do a search for words that begin with certain blends. There's wide variety of things you could search for!
  

• Title It! - Use labels to cover the titles of the article.  Task your friends with creating a title for the article once they have read it.  Not as easy as it might seem if you require a relevant title that will catch the reader's interest.  It really forces your friends to mentally summarize the article and think about the author's message.
• A Magazine and A Task - There are so many generic graphic organizers that can be put with any magazine.  You can provide organizers that have your friends summarize, compare and contrast, sequence, etc.  Just match up a SN with a particular organizer and done.  I should say that SN all come with an activity sheet which you could also just copy and use.
• Social Studies Maps - There is a map in every SN, usually with questions that rely on reading the map and not the article.  It would be great to cut out a bunch of maps from different magazines, paste them on card stock, laminate them, and have your friends practice map skills using the various maps and dry erase markers.  You could have the answer key on the other side for easy self-checks.  This would also be a good center activity.
• Substitute Work - I'm sure this one was kind of obvious!  SN come with very explicit lesson plans and worksheets making them easy for substitutes to use.  I find the content is always on target, so I know a worthwhile lesson is being done while I am gone.  Plus, my friends like these newspapers which means I know the sub won't have resistant students on her hands.
• Have a Nonfiction Read In! - I wrote about a read in I recently had with my friends.  These would be great for that if you have a limited amount of time to do it and wanted your friends to get in some nonfiction text reading.
• Write the Story - The cover of each SN has a catchy title, a great photograph, and a blurb designed to spark your friends' interest.  Give them the cover and have them write the article that goes along with it.  Now, the obvious problem here is that these are informational articles, and your friends may not have the information needed to write the article.  No problem! They could write a draft, read the article, then incorporate some facts from the article into their own writing. They are writing, identifying facts, revising, and more.  Or, they could just write an imaginative piece.  Your choice.
• Cut Them Up - Lots of the photographs in the magazines would make great picture prompts.  If you are making a collage of some kind, old SN magazines are a great age appropriate resource for pictures unlike some magazines where the ads alone can make you cringe!
• Summer Quick Read Packets - If you want your friends to do some summer reading, create a variety pack of SN magazines in a folder.  Give your friends a folder to decorate with a summer reading theme.  Let them pick the magazines they would want to read over the summer to put in their folder. It wouldn't really matter if they've read them earlier in the year.  Rereading is good!  Plus, these are short, engaging articles that are great for reluctant readers to engage in over the summer. If there is an accountability or project component to your summer reading, the kids could complete the back page of the magazine which has questions to answer on the various articles.
• Interview the Expert - Pair your friends to read the same article.  When done, have one friend be the reporter and the other the expert.  Have the reporter interview the expert on the article topic.  They will both need to have read the article so the expert has the information and the reporter can come up with questions to ask.  
• Donate! - If all else fails and you really can't find a use for them in your classroom, donate them to a teacher who doesn't get a subscription.  Or, if your district allows, drop some off at your pediatrician's or orthodontist's office to put in with their magazines.  If you have a local boys or girls club you might donate them there.  

Those are just some ideas I came up with thinking about this today. I'll bet you could come up with even more! If you have another great idea or a thought about these ideas, tell us in the comments. Love to hear from you!