Building a Joyful Classroom Library

As an English teacher at the middle school and high school level, I was deeply passionate about helping all students remember (or find) their love of reading. In my classes, regardless of what other content we were learning, we were also always reading. Independent reading was a daily Do Now, with as little as ten minutes and as much as twenty-five minutes given for students to read. And, for what it’s worth, it seemed to make a huge difference. Students consistently reported reading more in my class than they ever had. More than that, they reported experiencing more joy in reading than they had in a long time, mostly because I gave them freedom in what they were reading. I attribute my success in building an independent reading program to three things: making independent reading time sacred, keeping my own reading life robust so I could make recommendations, and maintaining an up-to-date classroom library that reflected all of my students. Here are some tips on how to build a better classroom library for all students.

1) If you are lucky enough to have a school library, your new best friend should be your librarian. Librarians have a wealth of knowledge and resources, and can help you find new books and new resources for all of your kiddos. I was lucky enough to work at a high school with a kickass librarian, and she and I worked together to build out the independent reading program and the culture of reading across the school. You can learn more about what we did in this Boston EdTalk.

2) If you are responsible for your own classroom library, it’s time to do an evaluation of what you have in your collection and what genres and representation might be missing from your library. This audit can be a useful tool for helping you think through what you already have.

3) If you find after going through your collection that you are missing key representation (which nearly every library is!), how do you find great new books to add or replace old titles with? I recommend checking out the recommendation lists made by ProjectLit, a grassroots literacy organization devoted to making sure that all students find themselves in the books they read.

4) If your budget is limited, as school budgets often are, here are two recommendations. First Book is an incredible organization that sells books at deep discounts specifically to help out Title I schools. If you do not work at a Title I school, I also recommend visiting your local bookstores to see if they have any ARCs (advanced reader copies) that they can no longer use (and legally cannot sell). Often times, bookstores have a wealth of ARCs