Chapter 5 of Routman's Reading Essentials focuses on classroom libraries. While I am privileged to organize and oversee the school library which serves the needs of the whole school community rather than an individual classroom library, I still found many helpful ideas in this chapter. Routman recommends providing "lots of choices and books" and allowing students to play a role in the set-up of the library. In our school library, my goal is to help the users (students and teachers) easily find books that they want to read. Books are faced out on display shelves, graphic novels have their own featured section, books are put on top of shelves, and, yes, students can take books off of displays. Many students get overwhelmed when confronted with thousands of books on the shelves and need help finding that "right book" that captures their interest. Putting up signs, book review cards, pictures of favorite characters/series, or otherwise promoting titles helps lead students to those books.
A big, but controversial trend in school libraries has been ditching the Dewey Decimal system for what is called genrefication. Books are organized by genre: mystery, romance, horror, animals, action, etc. whether than more traditional categories. The impetus behind this trend is that genrefying leads to increased library circulation and enables students to more easily locate books they want to read. This is similar to Routman's classroom library that is organized according to the students' interests.
More information:
Exploring Genrefication in the School Library with Tiffany Whitehead
Sounds like a great idea! I would love to see a library organized in this way! Very interesting!
ReplyDeleteMy twin sister was talking about genrefication a while back (she is a children's librarian in VT). It was interesting to hear the pros and cons of Dewey vs. genres. An interesting topic to explore!
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