The biggest change here was to rename my tubs, using language kindergartners could understand. I found nonfiction was easier to start with I could carry over many of my tubs from my third-grade classroom library. I dove into my book collection and began sorting, keeping my goals in mind.

Tony urges us to have more than one or two nonfiction tubs, and to organize them with a variety of text levels.

The last resource I used, Is That a Fact? by Tony Stead, is the go-to book when thinking about nonfiction book tubs. I think this will be much more manageable for the students than the more arbitrary classification found with a number or letter system. Kathy Collins in Growing Readers helped me think about reorganizing leveled books by similar features (i.e., lines of text, picture clues and support). Within this text Katie DiCesare (a guest author) shared her thinking for setting up a first-grade classroom library, introducing me to the idea of using a dot system for organizing leveled books. The booklists and suggestions were a great crash course, and I was caught up quickly with new titles and thinking about libraries in the early grades. I felt out of the loop with early literacy, and the titles suggested in Beyond Leveled Books were both familiar and new. There is also a list of “Books We Love” to place alongside leveled books. The library requires as much thought as any of the other instructional decisions I make.” Beyond Leveled Books, by Karen Szymusiak, Franki Sibberson, and Lisa Koch has a fantastic section titled, “A Classroom Library That Teaches Early Readers About What It Means to Be a Reader.” Here I found suggestions for favorite authors, characters, nonfiction topics, song books, and familiar stories.

Here are Cathy’s encouraging words, “I have found that a well-organized and thoughtfully planned classroom library is essential. I also found support from this text with the task of reorganizing the library. More Than Guided Reading: Finding the Right Instructional Mix K-3 by Cathy Mere has a chapter titled “Growing Our Libraries.” This chapter guided my thinking for sorting my large collection of books into smaller groups, making it manageable and appealing to younger readers. I didn’t have time at the moment to read or reread all four books. I felt like a student myself as I used the table of contents and index to locate just the information about setting up a classroom library. I found four books with valuable information for me to read and ponder. When I need help in any areas of my life I find books to guide me. The third goal was to organize the books in a way that the students could manage and help maintain the classroom library. Second, I wanted a variety of genres available. First, I wanted the books accessible to the children all the time. It had been six years since I taught kindergarten, and thinking about transitional readers is very different than thinking about emergent readers.Īs I set up my new kindergarten library, I had books and boxes everywhere. But I wasn’t sure what would be appropriate for these younger students. I kept my nonfiction, biographies, and poetry texts for the initial move because I knew I wanted to include those genres. I could do that at the end of the school year. The first step was easy - pack away my chapter books. This is the only word I could use for many months as I thought about the transition from my third grade to a kindergarten classroom library.

Setting up a kindergarten classroom