MIA

Hello bloggy world! Yes it's been a while. I officially suck. I'm sorry for not blogging in forever. Things have been crazy busy this school year! It's safe to say that this year has been my most challenging school year yet! I've been working crazy long hours and I've been exhausted when I get home. But it's no excuse and I'm ready to get back into the swing of things.

I'm gonna ease myself back into the blog world by sharing with you how I organized my classroom library. This summer I had the luxury of having all my classroom stuff stored at my apartment. I've been wanting to get my classroom library organized for years now and this was my opportunity.

I was looking into getting one of those fancy scanners when I came across Booksource's Classroom Organizer. WOW! With this website you can log in all of your books by simply entering the ISBN. Even better, if you have an iPhone, you can download their free app and use your phone to scan the ISBN. It's awesome! Plus, you can add all kinds of information beyond title & author, you can put the price, reading level, location in your classroom & more. You can also export your information into an Excel spreadsheet. I did this and put it in a binder in my classroom and it's made finding my books so much easier.

I figured that since I was already putting each book's information into the database I might as well take the time to level all my books as well. This is where the luxury of being able to do it in my pjs while watching a movie comes in! The first place I turned to to level my books was the Scholastc Book Wizard. Sadly, a lot of the books I had either weren't on the site or they didn't have a level listed. This is where the AR Book Finder  and this Lexile Text Conversion Table came in. Using these, I was able to level almost all of my remaining books.

After getting all my books leveled I started to organize them. I decided to organize them by author and holiday and then sort the rest by level. The books I wasn't able to level I sorted by fiction & non fiction. My most favorite part by far was being able to log in the location of each book.  I was able to put in exactly which bin I was putting the books in. Now when I need to find a book I just look at my spreadsheet, find which bin it's in & grab it! It also makes it easy to lend books to coworkers because they can look up things themselves and get what they need.

The most tedious part was labeling all the books. I printed paper labels and attached them to the books with clear laminate. I made it so that my small labels on the books matched my large bin labels so that children could put them back easier. It was a lot of work but it's so nice to have all 600+ of my books accounted for, labeled and put away neatly!

Check out my TPT store to snag everything I made for my library!  Thanks for hanging in there and staying with me as I traverse this hectic year!