Classroom Library

This past year, I wanted to have a way to track the types of books that my students were reading and what they found the most interesting. I wanted them to interact with the class library in a meaningful and productive way, so I came up with an idea to have a "Books Bar Graph."

 At the beginning of the year, our bar graph looked like this. Each square is large enough for a regular sized post-it note to be stuck to it. The idea was that for each book a student read, they would write the name of the book and a little bit about it on a post-it and stick it on the graph above the genre.

Here are the guidelines that I posted just below the graph. Very clear, kinda fun (at least I thought so…)

 At the end of the year, our graph looked like this. Sad to say the least. I did learn a lot about my students however, in that they LOVED fantasy stories and would gobble those up a LOT faster than any other genre of book. I found that management was a little troublesome with the post-its that I had left attached to the poster itself. (I found quite a few post-its on the floor, on desks and used for things they were not intended for…) Probably a rookie move on my part, thinking back on it. 

At the very beginning of the year, I had gone over the idea of the bar graph, the labeling on the books in the classroom library that would indicate the genre of the book, the protocol of using the post-its and why the graph was useful. I thought that I had done all that I needed to in order to make this little pet project a success. Boy was I wrong. 

Things I will do differently next year:

1.) Following the beginning of the year routines set forth in "The First Six Weeks of School" by Paula Denton and Roxann Kriete (a great book for setting up routines at the beginning of the year, and one that my mentor uses year after year), I am going to introduce the Book Bar Graph using the guided learning model. Introduce it, give a brief outline of the expectations (begin as specific as needed or as general as wanted if you are not picky as to how things are done) and then model the process before giving students a chance to try it out for themselves and model for the rest of the class.

2.) After setting this up, I think it would be beneficial to also review the expectations (and why they matter) every so often. I wanted my students to be able to write a mini ad to "sell" the book they had just read to their classmates and hopefully excite them to read the same book. However, as the year wore on, I say more and more post-its with just the name of the author and the book title on them.

3.) During the second week of school, I would like to help my students with the idea of writing an "advertisement" by bringing in (or simply thinking about) an item that they love. This could be a toy, a book, a place they went for vacation, anything that they want their classmates to enjoy as well. With this thing or place in mind, we can work to write a convincing phrase that will "hook" the reader's attention. (This can help us as we work on RTL, Summary and story writing later on in the year and hooking the reader's attention at the beginning of our written pieces.) What a great start to Writer's Workshop ;)

4.) I will also need to monitor the post-it situation a bit more, by either hanging on to them myself or making it a class job. That way, they are used for a specific purpose instead of wasted.

5.) I need to make the bar graph much taller, possibly from floor to ceiling, to accommodate the number of books that are read and recorded.

The final and most important thing that I learned from last year, was to constantly review the progress of the bar graph and remind the class that it exists! (I think they forgot last year with its location facing away from the classroom.) I would love to work in some time at the end of every week, or every few weeks, to read though the "ads" to the class and get my students excited about reading other books. I think that the reviewing process is such a vital one in any elementary classroom.