Friday, December 26, 2008

Advice, please

Say you are a preschool teacher, or a former Georgia Child Care Provider of the Year and you have a large collection of children's books at home that you use in your curriculum. How do you organize these books?

By letter? (Books you would use during the week you study a certain letter, like Olivia during O week)

By theme? (Holidays definitely, but also stuff like Winter Weather, Spring, the ocean, etc)

By author? (Which is my natural OCD inclination. :P)

By series? (Like Arthur books, Olivia books, Pigeon boks, etc)

The books I have in my classroom that belong to the school are organized by letter, which works fairly well, but occasionally I find myself coming acoss a book that would have worked better for a previous letter or theme. So I'm kind of torn as how to organize at home.

Any thoughts???

3 comments:

J-Mom said...

I need to restructure my books. I have them organized all crazy, so I probably shouldn't tell you. It might bug you and you'd have to come and fix it:)

I do mine by shelf and then by different ways. One shelf is seasons and holidays. Another is series and lengthier books, (seeing I have more than preschool here). Then I have easy read in another area. I have a non-fiction shelf, etc, etc. I know I need to tweek my system a little better!

Good luck!

Beckie said...

I have all my preschool stuff organized by theme AND letter. If I needed a book for both, I made a copy so I'd have the book with one and the copy with the other.
It takes up more room, but I can grab it quick.
My preschool wall in my garage is 9 feet tall by 13-14 feet long.
I'll never be able to quit because of all the time and money I put into the resources!
Not sure if that helps but I do have to mention that I just noticed your profile pic.
You guys are holding up well!

Carol said...

As a former Georgia Child Care Provider of the Year, I arranged my books by theme. I used those colorful expanding jackets, wrote the theme on the tab and then filed those alphabetically in a plastic bin. Then I always had a selection of books that was ready and handy for that theme. These books were usually classified as "mine", but were read and shared with the kids during that week.

I had a book basket full of books that they could use anytime which were rotated on a regular basis. So, it was like they always had new books.