Summer, Organizing, and Unpacking

      It's officially summer time! I finished my classes, packed up, watched my friends graduate, and returned home (well, to my parents' house). This summer, I will have a couple of free weeks before I start my summer job. I will be working for a month at something called Summer Clubhouse, which reminds me of a cross between a day camp and summer school. The group I will be working most with are the children who just finished first grade. I am so excited for this opportunity! Plus, I will be living at the same house I will be at in the fall for student teaching.

      Now I have the lovely task ahead of me of unpacking from college and repacking for my summer job. Yesterday, as I was unpacking, I found that I have collected a lot of children's books over the past year. In the first practicum I had during my freshman year of college, my teacher told me that the best advice she could give me would be to start collecting children's books for my future classroom library right away so that I could do it a little bit at a time. I took this advice to heart and have collected a few books at a time over the past few years.

       When I put them all together yesterday, I found that I was not sure how I wanted to sort them or record what books I had. How do you keep track of your children's books? How do you choose to organize your classroom library (topic, author, reading level)? For now, I reorganized them so that the chapter books were in one box, nonfiction in another, curriculum in the blue bag, and fiction pictures books in the last box. Later this summer, I want to record them, put my name in them, and organize them better. What ideas do you have?