Does your school have a book room or leveled book library for guided reading? Recently, I worked at Lovett Elementary in HISD (Houston) where they have a wonderful book room with guided reading books for teachers to check out. We held planning meetings in this room on my visit. So handy for being able to quickly refer to texts as we learned together about improving small group instruction.
Several years ago I worked with Spring Branch ISD in Houston and visited every elementary to help set up a leveled book library tailored to the needs of that school. It was such an interesting project! There were so many ways in which to organize the space and the books.
Here are a few photos of leveled book libraries used by entire schools.
Lovett Elementary's leveled book library
Close up of guided reading library shelves at McWhirter Elementary in Clear Creek ISD (Houston area)
That looks amazing. I work at Love Elementary in HISD. We just got a guided reading bookroom. It would be amazing if you could come to our school to help us.
We have a FABULOUS book room at Herty in Lufkin ISD! Not only do we have an extensive selection of leveled books ready to be checked out and taken into the classroom, but we also have a selection of read alouds, teacher resource books, adult reads (for sanity), and even Reader’s Theater scripts copied and highlighted for teachers to check out!
We have also adopted “Conscious Discipline” at our school, and we have a “Teacher Safe Place” set up in our book room in case you need a little getaway on campus! We LOVE our bookroom!
Hey, I am in the process of organizing the books in our school. Right now I am putting each set of books in a bag and then in plastic tubs. How can the teachers check out the books in a easy way?
Joni,
This coming year, my school district is adopting the Benchmark Literacy program for grades 2-5. K-1 will adopt that program the following year. We are excited because the Benchmark Literacy program has leveled readers.
I teach kindergarten. My school is a K-1 school. We don’t have a bookroom. We are starting guided reading groups and desperately need leveled materials since our current reading program doesn’t have leveled materials. We came up with a solution to help us get started on a bookroom. We are working on it over the summer. Before school ended, we sent out a request for book donations. Teachers donated books from their classrooms-some were sets of books from old reading programs, others were from science and social studies adoptions where each teacher only had one copy of each title. Some teachers donated sets of books from their personal collections. Our plan is to create sets of 5 books (same title). We’ll put them in plastic bags and then in baskets. We will also level the books. We also will have a section with books/tapes/CDs for teachers to borrow to use in their listening centers.
We had several suggestions as far as checking out books. One idea was to put an index card with the title of the book in each bag. We would have a bulletin board with library book pockets. Each teacher would have a library pocket with his/her name on it. The teacher would put the index cards from the book bags into his/her library pocket when borrowing books.
Another idea was to use Post-It Notes. We are a K-1 school. We have 7 kindergarten teachers and 7 first grade teachers. We would have two boards-one for first grade and another for kindergarten. Each teacher would be assigned a certain color sticky note. When a teacher borrowed books, he/she would write the title on the sticky note and place it on the board.
Someone else suggested a sign out sheet. We felt that teachers might forget to flip back pages to check off when they returned books. It might gret confusing if you had to flip back through pages to figure out who had a set of books you wanted to borrow.
We are open to other suggestions if others have tried it and have a better system.
I am actually in the process of revamping our Literacy Library and am looking for ideas. We are a PK-5 campus with a Dual Language program. We have books from various publishers, genres etc. We also have titles that are English and Spanish. I am thinking of a color coding system but am not sure quite yet. We also need a new way of checking the books out. What do you all do? Also, what do you do with the instructional material that comes with the books? Do you make a copy for the books and keep the originals just in case they get lost?
Looking for ideas!
Thanks,
Shelly
How can I find information about how many books to find for a school that wants to start a guided reading library with about 400 students?