A Brief Treatise on Kínder Classroom Libraries

Hello y buenas tardes, dear lectores!

It's been far too long - and in the interim, I've moved jobs AND schools! I am writing you as a proud 50:50 Dual Language Kínder teacher, instructing half my day en español and half in English (más o menos). At a semester in, I can say with confidence that this was the right choice for me professionally and personally. Perhaps I'll tackle my motives in another post... but for now, please allow me to show you my classroom library. It is, quite simply, my organizational pride and joy.

 There it is! (This picture is from the beginning of November: now my book stands have El Gorro de Lana, Owl Moon, Coming on Home Soon, and Dos Lobos Blancos)

Let me walk you through the process:

First off, my dear friend and colleague helped me haul my approximately 450 books in our two tiny cars. (This is not even mentioning the other carloads of games, instruments, supplies, and manipulatives I dragged to my new school.)

At the preschool, I had been proud of my extensive library, but had only had out 30-40 books at a time - largely thematically-based. That was what my three-year-olds could handle; and thus it was easy to maintain order, as I was the only person who accessed my complete library.

For kindergarten, however, I knew I was going to have to create an organizational system that five-year-olds could learn and maintain.

A couple weeks before the school began, then, I headed to Lakeshore. Fortunately, they were having a container sale. Instead of grabbing their (more expensive and smaller) book boxes, I got 24 general storage containers in red, yellow, green, and blue. 

Back at the ranch at my new school, my friend and I dumped all the books out on my circle rug. We sorted and sorted and sorted, developing categories along the way and organizing based on each category's size. I typed them up and put them in a new tab in my Reading Strategies Google Spreadsheet. The verdict:

The books were in and categorized! But how to keep them that way?

I had an idea! It took my (saintly) EA the better part of a day to do it, but here's what each text in my library (save for oversize and class sets) has on its inside cover:

Each text has, in its upper left-hand corner, a stamp. I had it personalized to say:

Este libro pertenece 

a la biblioteca de

la Maestra Alix.

¡Leer es liberación!

(Freire, eat your heart out!)

For translanguaging ease, red is English in my classroom, blue is Spanish. If it's bilingual? You got it: purple. So, this particular book is in English.

Now, you'll note that there is also a colored sticker on the lower right-hand corner. It's yellow, and it's got a 4. So... Yes! You're right. It goes in the Yellow 4 bin and is therefore a Social Story. (This particular, wonderful book is The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson. I dare you to read it without crying.)

I was thrilled beyond belief when my kiddos, on their first day of kindergarten, were able to understand and utilize the library properly. As we've gone on, we've added our reading buddies (stuffed animals), a book hospital (for broken or ripped books), and our book bags.

The last item was inspired by this awesome blogger. Instead of using the (kind of expensive) cardboard book boxes she advocates, I used the same idea but got canvas bags - one per student. Students decorated them, and they use them to store the books they'd like to continue to read from day to day. They also have a "I can read" Ziploc bag inside their canvas bag, which is still just a letter list (I highlight the letter when they learn it) for most students, but has some BR texts for my higher readers.

(If you don't know La Viejecita que no le tenía miedo a nada... you MUST!)

¡Y ya! ¡Qué fácil! I mean, just kidding. It was a huge amount of work. But do trust me on this: it has been worth every moment of effort.

Coming soon: (hopefully) a post about how I incorporate all of this into my daily Reading Workshop, and also a post about crafting my read aloud curriculum for the semester. Also, of course I'll try to get an Historias del Juego post in soon - ¡don't think for a second my kids don't get to play every day in kínder!

¡Colorín colorado, este post se ha acabado!