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!
Maple by Lori Nichols
Little Owl's Night by Divya Srinivasan
