Alphabet Cards

One of the most important places in our classroom is our alphabet wall! This resource is used daily by my students. At the beginning of kindergarten, my students use this wall as a tool to learn the letters. As we begin writing, they use these to help match the letter with the sound and to remember what the letter looks like. I had alphabet cards that came with our curriculum, they aren’t very cute and many of the pictures are confusing. The letter Hh has a picture of a “hound” my students get confused and are consistently thinking of it as a dog.

So, I created my own alphabet cards to use this year. These cards will work much better! They include all 26 letters plus the digraphs ch, ph, sh, th, and wh. Plus they use melonheadz clip art! You can get your copy of the Alphabet Cards in my TpT store.

Library Inventory

Have you struggled with keeping your library organized and neat? Do you spend your valuable teacher time putting books away so that you and your students can find them? I did! It drove me crazy! I started organizing my books in a simple and kid friendly way – even my new kinders were successful in helping us keep our classroom library neat and organized! Be sure to check out my Classroom Library Organization.

That was a great first step, but I still found I had a few problems with my classroom library organization. The first was remembering if I already had a copy of a book. The second was remembering what category it was in. The third, was remembering where I stored some of my holiday/seasonal books or read alouds. After trying a couple of different strategies, I finally found one that made sense and is easy to maintain!

I created an Xcel spreadsheet that serves as a database for all my books. That seems a little intimidating and time consuming but it is totally worth it.

Book Title and Author Name

The first section of my Library Inventory is the easiest to fill out! I simply copied the title and author’s name into my inventory. This way, I can use the search feature to find a specific title or to see all the books by the same author! This is great for finding a specific book or for looking for multiple books by the same author.

Reading Level

Ever have parents asking you for suggestions of books their student can read at home? I have found it very time consuming to look up lists of leveled books that parents can purchase or find at their local library. My library inventory list allows me to sort the books by level. I can then recommend a few titles to parents. It also helps me quickly identify which books in our classroom level are at a students reading level! There are many databases our there that can help you level your books. At my school, I use Fontas & Pinnell’s Guided Reading Levels (AA-Z). I have used the Fontas & Pinnell Leveled Book Website. There were a lot of titles in this database, however, it is not free. A great free alternative is Scholastic Book Wizard.

Each book in my classroom has a sticker with the reading level on the top right corner (when available). I do have some books that weren’t in either of the databases and that is ok. For the books that I do know of, I put the level on the book. This helps students and myself know what level of book is a just right book for them. It also helps my students when they go book shopping because they know they have to find 3 in their level.

Location

This is my one of my favorite features of my book inventory! I love that I can easily search a book by title or topic and find it quickly and easily in my classroom! The location of the book matches the book basket labels in my class library and teacher storage. This way if a colleague needs to borrow a book, it can take less than two minutes to locate and pull the book!

Concepts/Units

The concepts and units section is not filled out for every book! It is just used for books that I use to help supplement certain lessons or units. This section works really well for geography, history, science, and character education lessons. I can quickly search for books with the concept of “Classroom Rules” or “Respect” and find all of the books in my library that teach those skills. It is also really helpful when planning my upcoming units. I can quickly search for “Continents” or “US Symbols” and all of the books in my classroom library that I use in these specific units are identified. I can then quickly pull them from the shelves and baskets in my library and teacher storage and have them ready for our lessons.

Topics & Genres

This section is probably the most time consuming section to fill out when you first begin. Think of this section as tags that you would add to describe a book. Very similar to the concepts section, the topics and genres section of my book inventory identifies morals, lessons, themes, and genres of my books. I use this to help recommend books to students. Really want to read about puppies? I can quickly search that and locate the books. Having an issue with bullying or making friends? Search for Friendship or Bullies and those particular books will be identified.

My classroom inventory list has been so helpful in not only keeping track of my books in my classroom, but also in helping me and my students make the most out of the books we have. I have an ever growing library and it can be very overwhelming for a student to choose a book, using my inventory, I can quickly help kids find books that they are interested in reading.

My classroom inventory list works best when paired with my other classroom library organization documents, but can stand alone. You can download it for free at my TpT store.

Interested in how I organize my library? Check our this blog post!

 

Happy teaching!

Library Organization System

Each fall a new group of students comes into my room and together we fall in love with our classroom library all over again. I love how much my students love spending time in our reading corner and their excitement for reading books. What I don’t love however, is that they don’t put the books back where they should go. Now we have books crammed into the baskets and shelves – some getting wrecked in the process. It’s hard to find things and it drives me crazy!

 

Thats why I have created a very simple and easy system to help my students know where to put their book when they are done using it. This helps keep our bins and baskets from overflowing with books and it helps my students and I quickly locate the texts we need.

Every single book in my classroom library has a book label on it. I put mine on the spine, but you can put it on the front or back cover as well. I DO NOT recommend putting it on the inside cover of the book because it will make it harder for students to locate. These book labels not only have my name on them (so it can be returned if lost) but they also have a picture that represents the category that book belongs in.

Each basket in my classroom library (and teacher storage) also has a basket label. These basket labels have matching pictures and the name of the category on them. When a student is finished reading a book, they simply match the two pictures so that they know where to return their book. Because I use pictures on the labels, my kinders don’t even need to read to be able to put them back successfully! Hurray!!

The best part is that I can easily recall (or look at my book inventory list) the category the the book belongs to, and can find it within minutes. It’s also been a huge time saver when other teachers ask to borrow a book. I found myself saying “I know I have it here somewhere” as we both dig through the baskets of books in my room.

Because each student can put their book away on their own, I don’t need to have any library helpers to keep things neat and organized. My students do that on their own. When I do find a book that is not in the right place, I take 30 seconds to 1 minute to review how to put the book away correctly.

I use the velcro picture hanging command strips to attach my basket labels to my shelves and baskets. This way, I can easily change out the labels as my library grows and expands. It also allows me to switch out holiday and monthly themed books!

  

You can buy these book labels and book basket labels from my TpT store. The book labels are editable so that you can put your own name on the books. They are sold individually or in a discounted bundle.

If you are interested in knowing more about how I inventory my books, check out this post!

Happy teaching!