The Classroom Library Project: Look What You Did!!!

Where I live nine months of the year.

While the calendar says summer is still here, my school calendar says it isn't, and so back to work I go.

I've spent several days at school already working to get my room back together for year twenty-four, and I think for the most part I am ready.

Really what I want to do here is to thank everyone who has sent or donated books to our new Classroom Library, and I want to show you where they have gone.

I'm still loading books onto shelves so they aren't all in these photos yet, but you'll get the idea, I'm sure.

My goal was to get 500 books by August 6, which is when our year starts.  As of right now, I have 246 books and 224 of those are unique titles; I have some duplicates but that is absolutely fine.  People have been so generous in sending books, it has revived my jaded spirit!

Almost every day there are books in the mail from the Amazon Wish List (it's still being updated if you want to jump in on this!).

I came home from vacation and found two huge boxes of books that some generous people shipped to me.  In my school mailbox I got a beautiful, hardback copy of Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See; it was carefully packed in a nice box with styrofoam peanuts.  I will treasure it.

I've had friends hand me cash money to buy books and another friend just handed me his credit card and said, "Get a couple of books!"  It's so gratifying that people support this project.

On my own, I've raided Goodwill and The Thrifty Peanut almost weekly loading up on books!  We have two Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood and I've pulled a few books from those (always leaving another book in its place!)

And I've ordered books from my own Wish List just to be sure we get them.

I've submitted a couple of grants and hope at least one comes through, but I know that's a long shot.  I've got a Donor's Choose project up and sometimes some great philanthropist will come through and fund a bunch of projects before school starts - I'm hoping someone funds mine!

So, I'm not finished gathering books, but I did want you generous folks who have helped me to see my progress.

This is my fiction shelf:

My fiction shelf

That's A-Z, all fiction, and as you can see, it's about to fill up.

This is my non-fiction shelf - it needs some books so that's where I've been concentrating my Wish List lately.  I came through and added a bunch of non-fiction to the list and people started sending those!  This shelf holds biography/memoir (that's the full shelf), informational books, poetry, and I have a shelf going for the Chicken Soup books that I've picked up.  There's room to grow.

Non-fiction

I've got to fill that one up!

I have two more shelves in my room; one is built in and currently holds class sets of textbooks that we no longer use (but I can't let go of them), and the other just holds our Common Core Guidebooks and Student Readers.  I have boxes with all the copies of things we have to read there.  All that can be moved if I need to use that shelf for actual books.

My non-fiction shelf is the one that I covered with pages from To Kill a Mockingbird.  I love it.

In this shot you can see the fiction shelf on the far right and on the left is the built in shelf with textbooks and dictionaries:

And the non-fiction shelf can be seen in this one:

And in this photo you can see the shelf that holds our copies of Common Core material.

(It's no secret how I feel about Common Core and this new curriculum but I'm not going to revisit that here.)

It's not a big room at all, but it's home for 180 + days for me and for my students.  (And dig those gorgeous parquet floors!)

I am super excited about the great reading that will be happening inside this room and once again want to really thank everyone who helped us fill these shelves!  And of course as we progress through the year I'm going to keep you posted!



Previously on SIGIS:
Building a Classroom Library: Help!  (May 7, 2018)
There's a Sad, Empty Bookshelf in M205 (May 11, 2018)
M205 Library Update: You Guy's ROCK! (May 14, 2018)
We Are Up to 73 Books!  (May 22, 2018)
M205 Classroom Library: The Shelf Project (May 31, 2018)
"Can I Read This?" A Teacher's Dream Comes True (June 21, 2018)

Further Reading:
Every Child, Every Day  (ASCD, March 2012)
Statement on Classroom Libraries (NCTE, May 31, 2017)
Building Relationships With Students Through Books (Cult of Pedagogy, May 8, 2016)
The Importance of a Classroom Library (Edutopia, April 16, 2009)
How to Stop Killing the Love of Reading (Cult of Pedagogy, December 3, 2017)
The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller (Amazon)
Readicide by Kelly Gallagher (Amazon)

The Amazon Wish List