Home Library Organization

I am a teacher. If you are like me, you are a book junkie. My personal dealer is Scholastic. They make it so easy to buy books. Those nice little fliers that you send out to your students are full of cheap books. You can find great things there for only $0.99. When I was still working in the classroom, I would often purchase books in sets of five or ten. My bookshelves were already overflowing...and then I found out about the warehouse sales. If you are blessed to live near a Scholastic Warehouse, you know what I mean.

The Scholastic Warehouse sale had a room where you could fill a small box with books for only $10. You had to dig through giant boxes of books to find what you wanted, but it was worth it. I always found a great treasure in those giant boxes. And if you couldn't find what you wanted in there, the rest of the warehouse was 50% off. (Note, in recent years, the warehouse sales just aren't as good. They have cleaned up the fill a box room and it doesn't quite have the selection and deals it once did. And not everything is 50% off, but you can still get good things.)

So now I have books for every need. I have easy to read books for my youngest kids. I have chapter books for every age. I have books for me to get away from it all. I have cookbooks, science books, fantasy, and everything in between. But for a long time, I couldn't find the book I wanted when I needed it. This is what my bookshelves looked like.

I knew I needed help. I spent so much time searching for the books I needed. Many times I would skip the lesson I wanted to do because I could not find the book I wanted. Then I came up with a simple way to organize my books. All I needed was some colored dot stickers and some packing tape and a bit of time.

First I decided how I wanted to organize my books. I assigned them to a category and gave each category a color: science/red, social studies/dark blue, fairy tales/ pink, Christmas/green, fall/orange etc. Then I started placing stickers on the spine of each book, near the bottom. I needed the packing tape to make the stickers stay on. Finally I placed the books on the shelves organized by colored sticker.

This was perfect for all of those picture books, but what about chapter books? I decided to organize them alphabetically by series name. Because these books tend to be shorter than picture books, I set up my bookshelf to have the top shelf shorter than the others and I placed all those chapter books there.

The last problem was all of those "easy to read" books. They are all the same size and very skinny. The biggest problem with these books, is the vast difference in what each publisher considers easy. A "Step Into Reading" level one is very different from an "I Can Read It" level one. I wanted

these books organized by reading level based on what my child can actually read. So I spent some time placing them into stacks based on what I thought was a level 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5. Then I wanted to mark them for my bookshelf. The spines were too thin to use stickers effectively. So I decided to draw permanent black lines across the spines. I set the books together and drew one line on the easiest books, two lines on the next level etc. Now when they are all together, I can see at a glance which level it is.

Now my shelves looks so much better. I can find my books quickly. And the best part, my kids can even put the books away without any problems.

Be warned, if you decide to try this at your home, it will get messier before it gets cleaner.