I’m here to give you a quick peek at how I organize my classroom library. I have all of my books labeled with a sticker that corresponds to what basket it goes in. Some of them are sorted by the genre of the book and some are sorted by favorite authors. I don’t have my books sorted by level because my students choose these books as interest books. They have other (leveled) books in their book boxes that come from our school’s book room.

Students can use the stickers on the books to see where they are supposed to put the book back when they are finished with it. The picture on the sticker matches the label on the basket.

I don’t have all of my books out at once, just enough to fill my shelves. I also don’t have the baskets too heavy so that my students can pull the basket down to look through it and then put it back.

I let my students book shop once a week. They get to choose 2 of our classroom library books to keep in their book box for the week. My students love having a mixture of leveled books that they feel confident in reading and a few high interest books that they can “read” in other ways- by retelling the story or by looking at the pictures. They also LOVE getting one of the non-fiction books that we have. Weather and animals seem to be the favorites!

I have the book basket labels available in my TpT store. I have created quite a few based on my own library, but there is also a file in the download for you to create your own labels based on your classroom library. Click the picture below to go to my TpT store.

Click here for the free download of these older book bin labels.