3 Ways You Can Organize Your Classroom Library (SOR Summer Series Part 5)

You’re listening to episode number 205 of the Stellar Teacher Podcast.

Welcome back to another episode of our Stellar Teacher Science of Reading Summer Series. We are a little over halfway through this summer series where every Thursday I am releasing a bonus episode that shares some really practical strategies and action steps that you can take to ensure that your literacy instruction is aligned to the science of reading. These episodes have been pretty short, they’ve been pretty focused, and they are perfect for you to get through this summer to really get you excited and pumped up for your literacy instruction next year.

Now, if you are just discovering us for the first time, welcome, I always love having new podcast listeners join us. Don’t worry, you are still able to catch all of the other episodes in our summer series. Just go back and start with episode number 197. That is the first one we did this summer. And then just listen to all of the odd numbered episodes until you get back to this one. Of course, you can listen to the even episodes as well, they’re just as good. But all of the odd episodes are the ones in our summer series.

Now, most of the episodes in our series this summer, and really most of what I talk about on the podcast has to do with instructional strategies and the way that we teach our students, which as you know, is really important. As educators, we need to be aware of effective instructional practices that are evidence based that are aligned to the science. I know I’ve shared this saying before, but curriculum doesn’t teach students to read teachers do. So of course, helping you expand your content knowledge is a really big goal of the podcast. And while having a lot of content knowledge and understanding that you know best practices is really, really important. There are other things that we need to really understand and be aware of.

And one of the things that I don’t talk about a lot on the podcast that can still have a really big impact on our just overall literacy instruction is our classroom environment. And, you know, we want to make sure that our instruction is aligned with the science of reading. But we also want to make sure that how we are setting up and organizing the learning space in our classroom is also aligned with the science of reading. And one area in particular that I think is incredibly important for us to take a look at is our classroom libraries, and how we have them organized.

So today, I have three ways that you can consider organizing your classroom that I think would be aligned to the science of reading. And before I share these three options, I do want to share one way that I think that you should avoid and that you should not set up your classroom library. And that is organizing your classroom library by reading levels. Full disclosure here, I used to set up my classroom library by reading levels. So if that is how you organized your classroom library this last year, know that that is okay. I think most teachers out there at one point in their careers was organizing their classroom libraries by level, because at one point that is what we thought was the best practice. I think back to when I taught second grade, I had those red bins, I think they were scholastic bins that came with our guided reading library sets, and at the front of every bin was a cute little label that I had made that had all the reading levels, we had our A bin our B bin, I think we had three or four J and K bins. And my students knew their reading levels, and they knew that they should search for books that fell within a specific reading level. My husband even remembers coming in and spending hours on a Saturday before the school year began and searching for the book titles that I had in my library on the Scholastic website to determine their reading levels, so he could help me organize and level my classroom library. And honestly, when I think back to that I kind of shudder a little bit and think like what was I thinking, because we know that reading levels really aren’t a thing, and having students be limited to reading a specific level isn’t actually going to help them grow as readers. And it’s also not going to help them develop a love of reading.

So there’s really no benefit to having our classroom library organized by levels. Ultimately, there are other ways that we should set up our classroom libraries. So by the time I moved to fourth grade, I started to discover and understand that there were other options that I could consider. I still had some bins that had levels on it. And again, I wish that I would have done things differently. But now that I have better knowledge, I’m going to share that with you. And hopefully, if you were still organizing your library by level this last year, you will reconsider some of these other options for your classroom library this next year.

So the first method is probably my favorite and that is to organize your classroom library by genre. And this is when you group your books together according to the genre of the text. You would have a section for biographies, autobiographies, fantasy, historical fiction, and informational graphic novel, all of the different genres that exist. And I think there’s a lot of benefits to setting up your classroom library in this specific way. Students get to rely on past reading experiences to really help them identify books that they would like to read. So if they know that they love reading graphic novels, then they know how to easily find books in your library that they’re going to enjoy reading. And I also think this is beneficial, because this is how a lot of libraries and bookstores also set up their organization of books. You know, if I go into Barnes and Noble, I can go to the realistic fiction section or the nonfiction section, and I can find a book that I know that I’m going to enjoy. So having a classroom library organized by genre is going to mirror how students might browse for books in the real world. And I also think that it can encourage students to just become aware of the genres that they either enjoy or like to read, or also genres that they might not have considered before. You know, if you have a whole section on traditional literature in your library, and your students haven’t spent much time exploring that genre, then even just seeing that that option exists, might encourage them to go and explore it.

Now, of course, with every option, you know, there’s benefits, and there’s some limitations. So I think that there are some limitations that you might want to consider if you’re going to organize your classroom library by genre. And I think this comes to if your students have a very specific book in mind that they want to read, they got a recommendation from a friend or they you know, saw it on social media somewhere. But if they don’t know the genre, then it might be hard to locate it in your classroom library. I also think that sometimes organizing by genre can be difficult, because sometimes there’s books that might fall into two different genres, might not be a very clear cut, genre, and it might be difficult to figure out which section to place it in, in your library. So just some limitations to keep in mind. But I love the idea of having classroom libraries organized by genre. I think just because I love teaching genre to students, it’s fun. And that can be a great way to organize your library.

Okay, another option is to organize your classroom library by topic or theme. And this one, I think, is also really great because it can be an efficient way for students to find books that they would enjoy reading. So you can organize your books by similar topic or theme. You can have books about sports, books about school, books about friendship, books about science, history, so on and so on. Again, if we think about the benefits of this organizational sort of style, it can be really easy for kids to locate books that they know that they would like to read. You know, so if they’re really interested in a topic, it’s going to be easy for them to find a topic of that book. It can also be easy for you to categorize books, because it’s relatively easy to come up with a topic for every book. Sometimes it can be hard to think about genre, but a topic is relatively easy to be like, okay, here’s the topic, done. It can also make searching for books a little bit easier, because you can control the size of the category by creating subcategories. So if you have a large collection of books about sports in your library, you can create some subcategories. So you could have picture books about sports, informational books about sports, chapter books about sports. And then it makes it easy for students within that topic to find the specific book that they’re looking for.

And of course, with every style, there are some limitations. So if you are organizing your library by topic or theme, it might be hard to figure out where you want to put books in the same series by the same author that might not have the same topic or theme. When I was in the classroom, my students loved reading the “I survived” books, or the “Who was the person” book series. But because all of those books have really a different topic or theme, we would be splitting up the series. And so if students are trying to read through the series, it would be hard for them to locate the next book. And sometimes too, I loved having a lot of picture books in my library. Sometimes picture books can have multiple themes, or multiple topics. And so sometimes it can be hard to categorize them into just one topic or one theme. And then of course, if you have too many choices for a topic or theme, you know, so let’s say you’ve got like 30 different topics in your classroom library. Sometimes just like too many choices can be overwhelming for students. And so it can be hard for students to pick a topic or a book and then they can just spend a lot of time searching. So too many choices for topics or themes can also make it difficult for students to make a decision. But it still is a good option for organizing your classroom library.

And then the third option is to simply organize your books by author or by series. And again, there’s a lot of benefits to this option. If your students enjoy reading, you know, like all of the Percy Jackson series or all of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, then they would be able to find all of the other books in that series relatively easily. It also helps students see that authors will have multiple books in their collection. So even if they don’t have them all in a series. For example, Jacqueline Woodson is an author I really enjoy reading her books, and she’s got multiple picture books, chapter books, and even some poetry books. And if all of her books are placed together, then students can see the range of writing topics and styles that she writes about. So that can be a benefit as well.

And then of course, there are some limitations. So if you are organizing your books by author and series, students don’t always know who the author is of a certain book, maybe they’ve seen a classmate read a book, and they want to read it, but they don’t know who the author is. And if that’s how your library is set up, then it might be more challenging for them to find the books that they’re looking for.

So as you’re listening through these, you’re like, okay, there’s benefits and limitations to both, so how do I make a decision? So one thing that you could consider is really doing a combination of all three. Now, I liked the idea of having your main organization in your library be by genre. So I would encourage you to start there, and really thinking about how to organize your books according to genre. And then within each genre, you could sort of have these sub categories, sub organizations. So within each genre category, you could see if there are specific series or sets of books that you should keep together and label so students can easily locate them. Or if there are topics that your students like to read about that you want to highlight within certain genres. Or if there are popular authors that write within the same genre that you could group together on the same shelf to make it easy for students to find those books.

The reality of it is, is that there are a lot of different variations and ways that you can set up your library. And while I don’t necessarily think that there is one specific way that you have to set up your library, I do think that we need to avoid setting up our classroom libraries according to reading levels. So as long as you’re organizing your classroom library, by genre, topic, theme or author or some combination of that, then you are going to really be encouraging your students to search and discover for books that are going to cultivate a love of reading, help them develop knowledge and also give them that real life experience to this is how books are organized in the real world.

Now I know this episode was a little bit different from some of the other episodes in our SOR series, but I do hope that it encourages you to think about your classroom environment, and what you are doing to make sure that that space is also aligned to the science of reading. Now be sure to tune in next week for our next bonus episode in our Science of Reading Summer Series. We are going to be talking about something that is usually really challenging for both upper elementary students and teachers as well. So I hope you’ll join me then.

Thanks so much for joining me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode and are finding value in this podcast, it would mean the world to me if you subscribe and leave a five star positive review. This helps me spread the word to more and more teachers just like you. Don’t forget to join me over on Instagram @thestellarteachercompany. And you can also find links and resources from this episode in the show notes at stellarteacher.com. I’ll see you back here next week.