Smooth Sailing into a New Year: Tips, Tricks, and Giveaways

Are you ready to start sailing into a new year?

I've got a great tip for you on how to set up your classroom library.  I know many of you have wonderfully organized classroom libraries with rows of beautiful bright baskets filled with books.  I'm just not a basket person.  I love my classroom library.  I love seeing rows upon rows of books in my little cubby bookshelves.  I love that students can see all the spines, read the titles, and know what treasures are within.  I even have my desk positioned across from my classroom library because staring at it just makes me happy.  

This is my classroom library.  I'm not sure if you can see in the picture, but I have a little white label at the bottom of each cubby that has either a genre, author name, or series (if the series fits the whole cubby).  All the books in a particular genre (I have a few cubbies with the same genre), by a certain author, or within a series are *supposed* to go back to the properly labelled cubby.  In a perfect world.  ;)  My students are pretty good at returning series to the right spot, and authors sometimes, but those genre cubbies never stay right - and I've relied on students volunteering to reorganize the cubbies many times during the year.

And now I've got a solution!  I have a crazy washi tape collection that has just been sitting in a craft drawer (big dreams, no time).  To keep my library organized, I can put a piece of washi tape on the spine of my books that go into a certain cubby or shelf (and put a piece of matching washi tape right on the cubby (or shelf) the book belongs to.  I can write the genre, series, or author name right onto the washi tape.  I think this will be a beautiful solution, and I know it will help my students keep my library organized.  If you don't have washi tape, you could do the same thing with masking tape, and just draw a coloured dot or pattern on the masking tape.  Easy Peasy.

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