Teaching Tales Along the Yellow Brick Road: classroom library

Have I mentioned that I haven't been the best blogger lately? This school year has been a bit different than the last couple of years and blogging has taken to the back burner a bit for me. We started a new curriculum Journeys and it's taken awhile to get used you. I'm going to try and update you all on the goings on in my classroom over the next couple of weeks.

For "way back Wednesday" how about going all the way back to the beginning of the school year?

Here is a peak into my room. Same color scheme as last year with a slight change in furniture placement. *Hopefully* a year from this December our *new* building will be complete and I'll redecorate then. For now though, it works!

A look from the front of the room.

My desk space.

Bookshelf love. All separated and organized by genre.

I cannot claim this wonderful idea. I found it on Instagram. As soon as I can remember the account I'll let you know... or if it was you, please holler!

My goofy group. They are fabulous!

Thanks to my friend Jivey, I learned of "Saving Fred" last year. It's still my favorite team building activity at the beginning of the year.

More to come! I hope you enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday!

This Tuesday I'm bringing back my app talk. Today I bought ($1) and tried "Book Retriever". A book keeping app with the ability to check books out among a few other functions. It seemed simple, it's been pinned often, and the reviews seemed about equal to other similar apps.

My thoughts... it's so/so... but it's fairly new and growing.

If a book has a bar code it makes the process much simpler. (Many Scholastic books do not).

If the book does not have a bar code, you can search for the book. This works sometimes. I feel that this is a growing app database which would lead to its tendency to not have many books. Which leads to manually impute. I use my phone rather than iPad to scan, so typing in the ISBN/Title/Author (all 3 of these are necessary) if I have the AR level I put that in under grade level as well. More information can be put in, but with my library of books being quite large I've kept it to the bare minimum.

Today I spent a few hours scanning and still have about half to go. I'm hoping if nothing else, I can have a digital record of books...but I'm hoping after all the time this will be utilized as a checkout system. I'm also hoping that I can keep this system up with new books I acquire. I figured that changing rooms was a great time to reorganize my classroom library and get all of those books entered.