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 We cannot offer our students meaningful              book access with damaged, outdated, 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if your books are Misleading (contain information that is no longer accurate), Ugly (torn, ripped, yellowed, etc,), Superseded (having older copies of books that are often updated), Trivial (books that don't engage most of your readers), Irrelevant (outdated, no longer popular), or can be found Elsewhere.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!

Putting the Pieces Together: A Novel Activity

In cleaning up my computer, I came across these pictures of an activity I did three years ago with my friends.  I didn't remember posting about it, and in searching the blog I couldn't find it.  So, better late than never!

This activity was done towards the later part of the school year.  We had spend time learning all the story elements and vocabulary that goes along with it. We had learned how to effectively write summaries and peer edit.  We had plenty of practice working in cooperative groups where collaboration and good conversation are a must.  It was time to put it all together.

After we had read the novel Frindle by Andrew Clements, I broke my friends into strategic groups of five.  They were going to work together to identify the important details of each story element and summarize their section.  We were putting the puzzle pieces (of all we had learned) together!

Each color represents a different group.  Each puzzle piece, from top to bottom, represents a different story element: characters, plot, problem, solution, setting.  Using a graphic organizer, my friends worked with their group to outline what from the book (working on important information and detail vs. unimportant) must be included in each section.

Once the graphic organizers were completed and agreed on by the group, each member took one element and turned it into a written summary on their puzzle piece.  Some were longer than others and required us to staple a couple of pages together, but it all worked out. It was a nice mix of cooperative work combined with an element of personal responsibility for the finished product. If they had room, they also created small illustrations that went along with their writing. These are some samples below.

When all were done, we glued them on to a column of construction paper in order. To finish, they added some extra illustrations.  Each group then presented their summary of the book. When we were done, I hung them on the lockers outside my room.  If you are a regular reader, you know of my never ending quest for vertical display ideas for those darn lockers!

I can't remember where I got the puzzle pieces, but honestly they are something you could draw free-hand on white paper and just make some copies.  If you wanted to get fancy, you could make it so the puzzle pieces fit together in a rectangle and actually put the pieces together for a display that doesn't have to be vertical.  I did minimize two puzzle pieces on the copier for the top of each chart, one had the book title and author while the other listed the kids' names.

All in all, this was a good activity that allowed the kids to pull together all we had been learning in reading and writing.  You can also make this as simple or involved as you want depending on the ages group your are working with. Another plus is that it works with any book!

Hanging Out With Stephanie Harvey

I'm going to start this post with an apology for the pictures.  I totally take all my blog pictures with my iPhone.  No fancy cameras here!  So, while my pictures are never amazing quality, they are usually a little better than these.  I think it's because they are pictures of photocopies that themselves were not super clear.  Oh well, it's the content that matters!

At the end of May, I went to an amazing workshop by Stephanie Harvey.  You probably know her best from her book Strategies That Work.  It is well worth checking out if you don't know it.  On this day, she was giving a presentation on comprehension.  

I'm not really going to dissect the entire workshop here, because I couldn't do it justice.  I will, however, share a small hodge-podge of ideas and thoughts.

•  First, much to my surprise, it was a small gathering. There were only about 30 or so people there.  We were able to interact and converse with Stephanie in a way that you just can't when you are in a large crowd.  It was great to be so up close and personal with an educator of her caliber.

• One of the things stressed was the importance of living a curious life.  The best learning happens when there is a genuine desire to know something new. Stephanie went on to stress the importance of teachers modeling this by being inquisitive ourselves and sharing this with our students.  She told a story about a teacher that was telling her kids how she knew it was Spring because birds had come back and built a nest in the eaves of her house.  She wondered why they always picked that particular eave to build every year.  She wondered if it was the same birds that were coming back every year.  This was a conversation she had with her students which led to them asking questions as well which led to investigation, research, reading, and writing to find the answers.  Because the topic came from a genuine question, there was genuine interest in finding the answers.                                                                                                                                                                                    This sounds great, but if you are like me you are thinking that we have specific curriculum to cover and birds in eaves doesn't exactly lend itself to what I need to teach.  Well, it's not about the exact content.  It is about approaching any content with a good measure of curiosity. What is it about this subject that I want to know?  As the page in her handout below noyes, ask questions and care about finding the answers.  Perhaps rather than approaching those content area topics with a "this is what I have to cover and I'm going to do it in x number of lessons with this topic on day 1, this on day 2, etc." we might be able to get our students better invested if we find out what they are curious to know about the topic.  I would imagine that what we "have" to cover will work its way in.

• Stephanie related a quote by P. David Pearson that I also liked. "The questions a student asks after reading a text are a better assessment than the questions a student can answer about that text."  So true if you really think about it.  To ask a good question about a text requires you to comprehend and synthesize that text, which absolutely requires higher level thinking skills. When a child asks an awesome question about a text, you know they got it.  You know they understood, thought about what they read ,and were able to move beyond to think outside the text.  When a child doesn't ask those great questions, but asks questions that show basic understanding or misinformation, you know there is still work to be done.  Stephanie suggested that asking something as simple as, "What questions do you have about what we read?" will provide you with a nice assessment of the reader, perhaps better than a story quiz will.  (If you want to know more related to Pearson's quote, this blogger did a synopsis of his speech from which this quote comes, and you can view the slides he used in giving the speech by clicking here and going to the link "Reading Assessment: Still Time to Change." There are also a lot of other interesting articles linked on the page you might like.)

• The amount of time children spend reading on an average day was also discussed.  There are so many studies that show the more time spent reading in a school day, the higher the reading achievement.  Stephanie did point out the significance of other factors such as socio-economic status, but one of the largest factors of success was the amount of time spent reading in the school day.  She backed up the importance of this siting many different studies that support the correlation.   One study showed that the lowest performing classrooms spent about 30 minutes a day reading while the highest achieving classrooms spent almost half the day reading. My first thought was that half a day reading seems like an unachievable goal with so many demands on our instruction time.  The most obvious solution is that our students need to be reading across the curriculum to get in that reading time.  Stephanie went on to say if we teach science and social studies in a day, taking the first ten minutes of each class to have the students read a topic related text and write down a question is twenty minutes done and added to that total reading time.  In my school, we don't teach our content classes every day so increasing our reading time in this way is still somewhat of a challenge.  However, any increase in student reading time that we can make happen is a step in the right direction!

As I wrote, there is so much more I could write about, but I will end my recap with one more thought from Stephanie Harvey.  She ended the workshop discussing some of the difficulties we face as teachers these days; curriculum demands, time constraints, the overall attitude towards teachers these days, common core, and more. As teachers, we are pulled in so many directions and given so many directives that impact our teaching.  In light of all that, her final advice to us was this:  Good instruction is good instruction, so stay the course!  In case you can't tell, it was a great workshop!

I am also going to do a little plug here for Rutgers University, specifically their Center for Literacy Development at Rutgers Graduate School of Education.  I'm lucky enough to live close enough to the university that I am able to attend their literacy workshops and experience amazing literacy leaders like Stephanie Harvey.  Below is a flyer for an upcoming development day this summer; Children's Literature in the Elementary & Middle School.   I am planning to attend because I love Seymour Simon's books and would like to hear him speak.  He is a great author of science books that just grab my students' interest every time.

But, what I am most excited about is their next literacy development series.  They are always able to get great literacy leaders to come and present.  You can sign up for the entire series or as many presentations as you like.  They aren't two day workshops, instead they offer two options.  The first day is a full day workshop, or if your time is limited, the second day is what they call an after school series which usually runs 4:30-6:30 and offers an abbreviated presentation of the full day workshop.

You can see from the flyer below that they have some phenomenal speakers coming up.  Harvey Daniels wrote, among his many publications, a great book about literature circles you might be familiar with.  One of Debbie Miller's more recent books, No More Independent Reading Without Support, is on my summer reading list.  Beers and Probst have a great book out now about close reading that is also on my to-read list.  Kylene Beer has a blog you might want to check out if you have an interest in literacy, which I have to assume you do if you are still reading this! I especially like her post on the importance of summer reading.  Finally, the last presenter in the series is Donalyn Miller author of The Book Whisperer.  I love that book!  If you need one professional book for your summer reading list, I would suggest that one. It is an easy read for the summer and will change how you think about reading.

My plan is to attend all four workshops.  I'm hoping I can get my district to pay for them or at least a couple of them.  If not, I will pay out of pocket because they are so worth it! When I find a good thing, I like to share a good thing.  That is why I am telling you all about these upcoming professional development opportunities.  If you are in the tri-state area, I encourage you to try and attend one.  They are never less than amazing!

On a different note, I wanted to let you know that I updated the post on t-shirt book talks.  Even though the post is two years old, it is still a popular one.  And, despite noting that I don't have a rubric available for the project, I still get emails asking for one.  So much so that I decided to find you a rubric.  I found a great one!  I updated the post to link to the rubric.  It is a Teachers Pay Teachers product, but it is only $1.50 and well worth it!  So, if you are still looking for a book talk rubric, click HERE to go to the post and the link.

Finally, I will see you Sunday for some new Weekend Words! My weekend words this week come straight from the Stephanie Harvey workshop and just may be my favorite so far! Check back on Sunday to see what she said.  If you've missed some past Weekend Words, you can see them here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Any thoughts on the Stephanie Harvey workshop?  

Any one interested in attending any of the Literacy Center workshops?  

We can have lunch together! :-)

End of Year Favorite Book Activity

First, let us all take a minute to admire the creativity of this post title!  I am so lame at coming up with post titles. Most of the time I just put up the topic.  So, can you tell that this post is about an end of the year favorite book activity? :-)

As you may know, I teach in a building that was a middle school prior to being an elementary school.  This is why the hallway I teach in is lined with lockers instead of bulletin boards.  The kids use them as cubbies with no locks which is kind of nice because it keeps a lot of coat and book bag clutter out of the classroom itself.  However, it does pose a problem for displaying things.  We are constantly vertically challenged!  Whatever you put out has to fit on a locker, and you can't overlap because the kids need to be able to open them.  I've posted here and here about some different ways I've used vertical displays on the lockers.

The end of the year favorite book part was an idea I had to have our entire hallway do a common display for the end of the year and encourage summer reading.  What if each child in every class told about the most favorite book they read this year?  We would have a long hallway full of book suggestions for summer reading.  I made this big display at one end of the hallway on a bank of lockers that isn't in use.

I designed a sheet where each child could tell a bit about their favorite book and design the cover.

If you want to get lots of teachers involved in a project, make it as little work as possible for them and something they can do easily! I made a class set of copies for each classroom and a quick Power Point that teachers could use to explain the activity.   Teachers could have students do this activity in class or for homework.  I was really happy that almost everyone was on board!



The kids did a great job.  It was an activity that spanned every reading and interest level, so all could participate.

In addition to the activity sheet, I made a quick poster for each teacher to hang outside their room with some summer cut-outs I picked up at the dollar store.  Since this was just for use in our hallway, will be thrown out at the end of June, and are not for sale or anything like that, I just googled different summer reading clip art to make some simple posters. It is a long hallway, so I thought this would help keep it all more cohesive.

When done, each class hung their posters on the lockers and we had a long hallway of book recommendations.  There are 15 classes on this hallway with about 25 kids per a class.  That is a hallway of 375 book recommendations!  The last thing I did was create a quick book list sheet where teachers could take their classes on a book walk to "shop" for books they might like to read this summer based on classmates recommendations.  Give each kid a clipboard and the blank sheet and they can walk around and read the hall to create their own personalized book list.

Finally, that big sun I made for the end of the hallway?  Turned out to be a little easier than I thought.  I projected the image on my Pro Board and hung some yellow fadeless bulletin board paper to trace it on.  

The only problem was, once I traced it I couldn't figure out how to get the blue book, white teeth, and sunglasses.  I thought it would look kind of messy if I colored it in.  Then, I looked over at my science tub and saw a roll of wax paper!  Now, you may already know this trick but when I realized I could trace the shape of the book on wax paper and then use that as a template to cut it out in blue paper, I was delighted.  Once I cut out the blue paper, I just glued it on the yellow paper.  I did the same for the teeth using white paper and the sunglasses using tin foil.  I wish someone had shared this wax paper trick with me years ago!  As I've written before, I'm a teacher just not an art teacher!  

If you would like a copy of the blank book form, you can download it here. It should be printed on 8.5" by 14" paper. The font is a little different than what you see in the photos, but still the same content. Well, except that the only one I saved is the original which says, "The Best Book I Read This Year."  I did revise it to say, "The Best Book I've Read This Year." So, if the I instead of I've will bug you like it did me, don't download it! Sorry, but for some reason I didn't save the revised copy.  So, that is the not-so-cleverly-titled "End of Year Favorite Book Activity."

A Rainy Day Read-In

Oh, the weather outside was frightful!

And, it was so dark and delightful!

So, what to do indeed?

Let Us Read! Let Us Read! Let Us Read!

This Wednesday, in about a 24 hour period, we got between 2-5 inches of rain across our area. The skies were dark and the rain was pouring.  It even sounded like there was an occasional clap of thunder. So, I dug out my basket of these great little book lights.

Right before Christmas, I found these on the clearance rack in the drugstore.  I mean a serious clearance.  They were around $1.50 each.  I grabbed them all!  Since then, they've been sitting in my closet just waiting for a day like this past Wednesday.

It was one of those days you just wish you could stay home in your comfy clothes with a good book.  Rainy, dark, and gloomy.  A perfect day to get lost in a story!  So, I moved my guided reading plans to the next day and we had an impromptu read-in!

Now, my love of reading is only matched by some of my friends' dread of reading.  However, these little lights, comfy floor pillows, and a dark room worked some kind of magic on them.  They read.  Not only did they read, they read with STAMINA!  25-30 minutes of nonstop reading! I didn't have to redirect one single friend.  They even thanked me for letting them read when we were done!  They wanted to know if we could do it again next time it rains.

WHO WERE THESE CHILDREN?!!!!  :-)

All kidding aside, it was amazing how something just a little different from the regular routing can motivate.  I sat and read with one friend who NEVER wants to read.  I was really amazed at how well it all went.

When time was up, we closed by telling a little about the books we were reading.  The retellings, comments, and thoughts my friends shared were some of the best this year.  This came not from reading in the dark, but from having extended reading time.  It is one of my big frustrations this year.  I know scheduling is hard, but I so wish my friends had more independent reading time in theirs.

You can't get better at reading if you don't read.  And, you need reading that goes beyond a quick 10 minutes at the end of a period.  You need reading time that allows you to get lost in your book.  Time enough to get involved in the plot and interested to know what is going to happen next.  With choppy five and ten minute reading times this type of engagement is difficult to achieve.

I know we ask our friends to read at home and even keep reading logs, but there is something to be said about being in a room with your classmates and everyone is engaged in a good book.

So, the next time it rains (or just close the shades if it doesn't) turn off the lights, grab some flashlights, and have a read-in!  It really is fun for all!  And, it absolutely is instructional time well spent!