Thursday, August 13, 2015

Genrefying the Everybody Section: Part 2

After several days of sorting, I finally had a rough sorting of my picture books. I ended up using these categories (instead of genres) for my first round of sorting:

  • Historical stories
  • Humorous stories
  • Traditional stories (folk tales, fairy tales, nursery rhymes)
  • Family
  • School
  • Holidays
  • Children/Friends
  • Animal Characters
  • Dinosaurs and dragons
  • Sports
  • Vehicles
  • Science
  • Dogs
  • Cats
  • Princesses
  • Pirates, ninjas, superhero
  • Cowboys
  • Wordless books
  • Art
  • Numbers
  • Alphabet
  • Words and books
Plus I already pulled out our "favorite authors", "favorite characters",  and easy reader books.
(A look at my books sorted into categories.)

As I started to put books onto the shelves, I quickly discovered that several categories were too large to really help my youngest students find what they were looking for. So I started trying to think of ways to further divide the categories of "historical fiction", "science", and "animal characters". I started with the historical fiction section, and will definitely pull out biographical/memoir stories and cultures of the world, but am still undecided about if I should divide U.S. history into "eras" or not. Next I will tackle science, which might turn into "the world around us" and "the animals around us" categories. When I take a look at the animal character books again, I might see if some could fall into some of my other categories, such as humorous, family, children/friends, and school.

In sharing my journey on Twitter, Kristen Murphy, a fellow librarian, shared a post by a public library that changed their picture books into neighborhoods. This article gave me something to think about, but I might ask a few students what they think before I make any changes! However my categories end up, I think it will make my picture book section much more accessible to my kindergartners and first graders! I can't wait to share it with them, but I've got some more work to do until then...

In case you want to take a look at how it is shaping up, here is a copy of the Periscope session I did earlier this week giving a visual tour of the process just after I finished sorting:
Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @ktlewis14 and @LibraryMWE to see more about my process and my reveal to students in a few weeks!