I have discovered Shelfari. I love it. I think it is a really great place to go for teachers to do some research on books and how they can be incorporated into the classroom. The site has community groups that you can join - I joined a few education groups. I also put most of my books on my "shelf" and included it in the side bar. Here is a larger shot of my pretty shelf:
I have a lot more books than I originally thought. I'm happy to be going through all of them. I bought more books over the weekend and had to stamp them all with my cute little stamp that I bought from Vista Print about a year ago. I blogged about it here a few months back.
I think it's really helpful to be able to go on Shelfari and search for different books that are good for specific things - such as teaching certain reading strategies or certain topics. It's really good for also keeping up with the books you own. I posted a question onto The Organized Classroom Blog's Facebook Page on Saturday asking teachers how they keep track of their books and how they organize them. I got a lot of good feedback! Most teachers store their books in bins, which is what I've seen throughout the classrooms I've been in. But I was surprised to learn that not a lot of teachers keep up with their books. I know that it's probably just too time consuming, especially when you have 45,984,124 other things that are a gazillion times more important to worry about. But since I don't have a classroom yet, I wanted to create a running list of the books I own. {Now -- all of you veteran teachers out there, please start taking bets on how long I will keep up with it once I have my own classroom.} I still have no clue how I am going to level these books. I am probably going to have to wait to see how my school levels books or if they use AR or Guided Reading or Grade Level Equivalent. I don't even know what any of those mean - it's so darn confusing to me! I found an excel spreadsheet on Beth Newingham's class blog and I adapted it for me {and my fake classroom}. Click here to check it out.
So tell me - how do you level your books? Do you keep a running list of them? What about checking out books from your classroom - do you allow it? If you do - how the heck do you keep track of when they're coming and going? I'd love to see pictures of your classroom libraries. Hmm! Maybe once I get more followers and traffic, I'll do a little class library linky party. No?Labels: Books, Class Library
