Chapter 5 from Routman's "Reading Essentials" is about organizing your classroom library as well as the school library. I found this chapter helpful for my classroom. I have struggled with my classroom library, how should it look? What kind of books should I have? How do I know my kids enjoy having the access to the library?
In this chapter, Routman discusses giving the students the chance to pick what they want to see in their classroom library. Within the first few days of school, ask questions and chart what they want to see in the classroom library. I think this idea could be used in any part of the school year, it allows the students to make choices and have the freedom to read what they would like. I also loved that Routman mentions we should take a day to allow our students to organize our classroom libraries. We can give them a set of guidelines and then allow them to organize the books. At the end of the day, we teachers are not the one rummaging around our classroom libraries, our students are the ones searching for a good book to read. Giving them the opportunity to organize the library in a way that makes sense to them would make it easier for the students to find something they would enjoy reading.
Routman mentions in one school she visited, the classroom focused only on non-fiction books to teach with and this allowed those students science and social studies testing scores to sky rocket. I found this very interesting because Routman mentions once you survey kids about the types of books they want to see, they are gravitate towards non-fiction books. As far as I can remember when I was in elementary school, I was the weird child who always checked out non-fiction books on dog breeds every time I had the chance. To this day I can point out majority dog breeds and tell you a few facts I learned reading those books. Serious nerd alert!!!
Routman points out in any bookstore you walk into.. the best seller books are not sitting on a shelf with just the book's spine facing us. Instead, the entire book, corner to corner is accessible for our eyes. It grabs our attention, so why not do that with some of our classroom library books? We should take the time to make a display in our classroom and continuously rotate the books in display. I think rotating the books based on what our curriculum is at the time is a great idea, it would gives my students more resources to what we are learning at the moment and may even benefit some struggling learners.
Kyra, I'm a fellow nerd. I LOVED the dog breed book. When I got to conference with a student on one, I was disappointed that golden doodles weren't represented. :) I loved Routman's suggestion at having students organize the library. I did this the last few years I was in the classroom. Not only does it help them develop an organizational system that works for them, but it reviews genre and other literacy standards in the process. Making the classroom library look like a store book display is a great way to make it appealing to your students. When you're doing this, it's a great opportunity to have conversations with your kids about why they are organizing the books a certain way.
ReplyDeleteHi Kyra,
ReplyDeleteLike you and Heather, I loved and still do enjoy reading nonfiction. I was the Ranger Rick and National Geographic nerd and my own children love these books and because I valued the genre of nonfiction my students did too. I agree 100% with you and Routman that we need to ensure that our classroom libraries reflect our students' interests and are organized for easy access to the authors, genres, topics that they are interested in. Thanks, Dawn