What's in your LIBRARY??

Well, we just finished day 14 on Friday. Whew! I think we are finally making leeway. Do you feel like that too? I had a family emergency on Wednesday so I had to get a sub. Eek! I would rather have had a surgery then have a sub the third week of school. When I returned on Thursday, it felt kinda like day one. We pulled it together but I didn’t have much of a voice by the end of the day. Bless their hearts (that’s the Texas way of saying OMG…HOT MESS!!).

Next week is homecoming for my kids so this weekend has been a little busy and I am sure this week will be all kinds of nuts. I cooked for a few hours last night and made about ten freezer meals for the next two weeks. I was trying to get ahead on this whole mom business! Besides, I need time to get down with my bad self. LOL!

I thought I would share with you tonight how I have my library set up. This is my little library. I actually have two book shelves. The one on the inside of the library is for my students. The one on the opposite side (facing our group rug area) is my library that I pick books from when I read to the class. Once I read a book, I put it in their library. This way, they are not reading anything from their library that hasn’t been read to them. I hope this helps them to “read” better.

I also have available reading phones. My brother in law made these for me out of PVC pipe and cost practically nothing. I also have tons of fun glasses that I bought from Oriental Trading and popped out the lenses.

I use Frog Street Press to teach phonics, colors, and numbers (along with district curriculum). I have these books based off of their songs that students can read too. They love them. They only issue is keeping them quiet because they can belt out some Apple Annie like it’s Broadway!

I also like to keep magazines available. I have Zoo Books, Scholastic magazines, etc. that have all been taken apart, laminated, and put on rings. They will last years this way. It’s part of our TEKS (Texas guidelines) that students read magazines and newspapers. 

I also have a basket of puppets handy so they can act out stories, though I prefer this not to be in the actual library. 

We also participate in a program with our local newspaper where a business donates a class set of newspapers to our classroom once a week. The students love Tuesdays because of this. I teach them where the title of the newspaper is, where to find the date, weather, headlines, local stories, etc.  Each week I will also give them an independent focus. For example, highlight all of the letters “a” or sight words “see”. We use it to find capital letters and punctuation. Really the possibilities are endless. J Kids also love to take the newspapers home and discuss what they learned about it. Parents are pretty impressed. You should see if your community has a program like this. J