In October, we went through the library and threw out any book that was a) in poor repair, b) irrelevant or too high a reading level, or c) older than the youngest teacher (me - if it predated 1975, we figured it should go.) We got rid of literally two-thirds of the non-fiction books. The fiction stuff gets weeded naturally when the books fall apart, but there wasn't a lot there that was newer than ten years old - a few hundred dollars worth of paperbacks, maybe.
Now, we've got seven big boxes of new non-fiction books, bought to support specific areas of the curriculum that we told them were lacking. I threw out three shelves out of four of 900's books; we just replaced more than half of them, and they're books our kids will read and use.
We've also been updating our book room. The goal of a book room is sets for guided and shared reading. We have big books for shared reading and sets of six, short books, leveled, for guided reading. (When I say leveled, I don't just mean by grade - there are four or more divisions per grade, as well.) We now have all our six-packs in ziploc baggies, labelled and sorted in bins in numerical order by level and book type. I just finished a unit on biographies, using those books. It was great, and the kids were interested (until I told them their homework over March Break was to turn their facts into paragraphs. They weren't too pleased then.)
The single most important factor in literacy improvement at a school is the state of the library or other book collections available to the kids. Nothing else comes close to that in importance. It's no accident that homes with many books produce kids who read. Schools with many books do, too.
no subject
Now, we've got seven big boxes of new non-fiction books, bought to support specific areas of the curriculum that we told them were lacking. I threw out three shelves out of four of 900's books; we just replaced more than half of them, and they're books our kids will read and use.
We've also been updating our book room. The goal of a book room is sets for guided and shared reading. We have big books for shared reading and sets of six, short books, leveled, for guided reading. (When I say leveled, I don't just mean by grade - there are four or more divisions per grade, as well.) We now have all our six-packs in ziploc baggies, labelled and sorted in bins in numerical order by level and book type. I just finished a unit on biographies, using those books. It was great, and the kids were interested (until I told them their homework over March Break was to turn their facts into paragraphs. They weren't too pleased then.)
The single most important factor in literacy improvement at a school is the state of the library or other book collections available to the kids. Nothing else comes close to that in importance. It's no accident that homes with many books produce kids who read. Schools with many books do, too.