Fourteenth Book Done!

I finished reading my fourteenth Iowa Children's Choice Award nominee, Athlete Vs. Mathlete by W.C. Mack.  In this story twin brothers, Russ and Owen Evans, seem to have very little in common until the new basketball coach comes to town. He orders Russ the mathlete to try out for basketball and Russ discovers that he likes it!

This was a fun, quick read.  It would make a fun read aloud for third, fourth, or fifth grade classroom. It could easily be used to teach checking for understanding, making predictions, and literary elements.

Part 2 of Classroom Library Reorganization!

 Now to discuss the checkout process in my library.  I had a sign out sheet on a clipboard.  Students remembered to checkout the books, when I reminded them otherwise not so much.  So first solution for that is mini lesson on classroom library prodigal. Here's how I am considering handling this.  My students will have color coded reading response journals.  Their journals will be do on certain days of the week.  The day your journal is due will be your book shopping day.  This will cut down on the number of students in the classroom library and at the checkout computers at any given time. Students will be able to check out 2 books from my classroom library at a time for a 2 week period for their book baskets.  Other books will come from our school library.

 Computers, you say? That is the next mini lesson I will be teaching.  I found this website called Booksource.  They offer a free classroom organizer. When I found the site a year or so ago they offered an app for Apple only. This app scans the bar codes on your books and puts them into a database. You can use that database for your students to check out books via your classroom computers and do a short review upon returning them.  The database will display guided reading level or AR level just to name a few.  This display is customizable by you.  

 Upon revisiting the site on Thursday I was elated to see that they now have an app for Android.  I have began bringing my books home from school, 1 box at a time, to scan them.  My goal is to have them all scanned, so that my database is up and running on the first day of school.  Wish me luck!

Reorganizing My Classroom Library

  Confession time:  My classroom library has always been an entity in my classroom, make that an unused entity in my classroom. After reading The Daily 5 by Gail Boushey & Joan Moser, I decided it was past time for this to change. The million dollar question was were to begin?  So I visited The Daily Cafe where I found a video about organizing your classroom library.  It clicked, made total sense.  
  At that time my library was a sad attempt at organizing books according to AR levels.  This organization or lack thereof lead to major frustration on my part, because the books where never were they were supposed to be.  Since no one including myself knew where they were supposed to be, this was not a surprising issue.
 I began making the change by visiting my local dollar store and purchasing plastic baskets.  Then I spent 4 hours sorting out my books by author, topic, or genre and created categories. Some sample categories that I created are Magic Treehouse, Sports, and Beverly Cleary.  I labeled the baskets and matching books with a number and sorted them into their proper place.  
 This all done, my goal is for my library to be the focus entity in my classroom not the unused entity.