Guided Reading Lending Library

In the last two days I've spent ten hours working to get my idea for a guided reading lending library off the ground. I am actually amazed at the amount of work that I got done (with the help of some other teachers) in just two days. I wanted to take a picture of the work in progress but I forgot to bring my camera.

Thursday I started by laying out all of the books that I had sets of (5-8 books). There was another teacher who had quite a few sets too so I added those to the piles. I then went around to every teacher's room (there were quite a few working) and asked them for what ever they had and added them to the stacks around my room. By the end of the day every desk and table surface was covered in sets of books.

Today when I came into my room I was overwhelmed at all the work there was left to do. Luckily I had three great teachers there to help me. Leveling the books was the biggest and most important part of the whole project. Two teachers worked on leveling the K-3 books (by using the Fountas and Pinnell book as well as by comparing them to anchor books and descriptions). I used the F&P 3-6 book to look up the other titles. Anything I couldn't find in the book was given to a third teacher who used a binder with level descriptions to figure out each book. By 1:00 we had leveled ALL of the books! I had had serious doubts about completing the job but we did it. Next came the task of organizing the books in groups by level A, B, C, etc. and the recording on a list to see what we had. As it turned out we had a pretty good assortment of books for each level. For levels P-Z, however, we were really lacking in books, just one or two titles per level. We'll have to order those books for next year. Finally we worked on coming up with a system for loaning out the books. Each set will be stored in a magazine file with a library card on the front. When a teacher wants to take books they just take the books and the book info card (with teaching points, vocab, etc.) out of the file, sign the card, and go.

Now we just need to organize them into the room/closet that will be their home (TBD at the moment). We want them to be in a place where all teachers can get to them any time they want without having to ask permission or hunt someone down for the key. If it's not accessible and easy to use, teachers won't use it. We'll probably get another day or two to work on the project next week (for some reason our school has lots of extra money to spend before we loose it). This is great news because I'd love to have the room ready to go by the start of the school year and September is just such a busy time for something like this.

When everything gets set up I will definitely share pictures.