I love a great library, whether it it’s my school library or my classroom library, and I have found that the best way to get students the books they want is to organize the books by genre. While grouping by genre is a bit controversial in school libraries, it seems to be the norm in classroom libraries; at our school, we organize by genre in both places.
In my classroom library, I used small labels and printed a page of each with my genre classifications. Then a student or I would put the proper genre label on each book so all students would know on which shelf (or group of shelves) the books were located.
On all of my classroom library books, I also included a label that read:
I did this with the hope that it would help my classroom books come back to me.
My shelves were always in slight disarray in regards to alphabetical order; I did not have the time or energy to insist students put the books away in proper alphabetical order within each genre. As long as they were on the genre shelf, it was relatively easy to find them. However, in the library, the spine label of each book reads:
This means that each book is on a genre shelf, but is in alphabetical order on that shelf by the author’s last name. Additionally, that same system is in place when students look up the book on the computer, so they always know on which genre shelf they will find a book. We also have very large shelf talkers that hang over each shelf to notify students what genre is on each shelf. My partner-in-crime Katrina created the shelf talkers and then copied them onto heavy colored cardstock so it is easy to distinguish one genre from the next.
Overall, here are the genre categories we use in the library and the classroom:
In my classroom, once students could browse a favorite shelf books immediately started moving more often, and the school library success rate has been quite similar. In fact, we almost doubled our checkout rate this fall after organizing the fiction by genre
If you haven’t made the switch yet to genre shelves, you should definitely consider doing so –getting the right book in the each student’s hands is really worth it! Download my Classroom Library Shelf Talkers now.