Let’s talk classroom libraries, the cornerstone stones of any classroom that takes years to
curate and seconds for students to often destroy! What types of books does your classroom library consist of?
Is it YOUR favorite books? Are the books based on thematic units that correspond with the content you are currently teaching? How many of you have let the students choose
which books they would like to go in their classroom library? After all, it is their classroom library, right?
Well, one day I decided to give my students the chance to select library books from my collection that interested them to fill our bookshelf. I was pleasantly surprised! You can imagine that titles, by Mo Willems, James Dean and Dr. Seuss filled up the bookshelf. However, to my surprise students even selected informational texts on topics that we’d learned about in the past. I was so excited to see that the students were interested in a variety of genres. Over the next few weeks the children were spending more and more time in the library area and actually excited about reading! Here are the five things that I learned by giving students an opportunity to select books for the classroom library.
1. Students were more motivated to spend time in the library area!
2. Students took ownership of the library and took care of those books.
3. I looked forward to having the children curate the library so I could observe their reading interests and capitalize on them by introducing related titles during instructional and guided reading time. (I’m such a teacher!)
4. It fostered more of a classroom community.
5. My students reading interests grew and they were having more conversations about the books that piqued their interests.
Go on, give it a try and tell me how it goes! See you soon in the galaxy and remember, you’re doing an incredible job with your kiddos!
