I cannot even hold in my excitement about our latest project in our home! I LOVE books (you can always follow
What We've Been Reading) and always have loved to read. When we started to have children one of the first things that we wanted to do with them was introduce them to great books. Then
when we made the decision to homeschool it took reading books in our home and having access to learning significantly more important.
Over the past few years as our collection of books has grown we started having piles of books in every room of the house! We are fortune enough that my parents and my husbands parents saved many of the books from our childhood and have started passing them along to our family now. Also, I have a great friend from our local homeschool group who runs a fantastic book online book business. She will has fantastic selections of classic and educational literature and will always keep an eye out for personal special wants/ needs! Definitely check her out at
Amy's Bookshelf! Although our books were somewhat organized it was hard not having them all together and I often would spend a lot of time searching for a book that I KNEW that we had or ending up getting duplicates due to lack of organization. I decided for my summer project to be organizing our books!
The first step was to find proper bookshelves! I was looking on Craigslist and at Garage Sales for a while to try to find a good deal, but I just was not seeing what I was looking for. I did not want to spend a ton of money, but I also wanted something to maximize space! Finally, I decided to purchase the
Billy series bookshelves from Ikea! What sealed the deal for me was how they curved around the corner including a corner bookshelf and also had extensions to go higher than a typical bookshelf! Although we do not have an Ikea in our city we do have a fantastic company who travels to Ikea each week and then will deliver and assemble your purchase order. Perfect!
So, we got the bookshelves and the next step was organization! I got a great idea from
Catholic Icing to use stickers to categorize our books. This concept really helps visually know where books go and more importantly keeps books easily sorted so that when you are looking for something in particular you quickly know where to look for it! I found the
stickers that I wanted to use and determined 10 categories that would work well for our families book collection (Religious, Reference/Homeschooling, Seasonal/Holiday, Art/Music/Poetry, Science, History, Classic Literature, Chapter Books, Favorite Authors/Series, and Easy Reader Books). Also, just like at our local library I made a key with pictures for the kids to know what each of the categories are. I laminated this key and posted it at the end of the bookshelf.
The next step was to purge books and then organize books into each category. I had a lot of books that were not great quality literature, we did not really read anymore, or that I had duplicates of; so all of those went to a new home! The books that I wanted to keep each got a color coded sticker put on the binding and then the shelf that those books on have the matching sticker so we know where to put the books back when we are done using them. I thought this was going to be an OVERWHELMING process, but the kids loved to help and we got all of the stickers on the books in one afternoon.
Some books did not get stickers on them because they are really great books and also kind of obvious what they are! These include our
My Book House books,
Childcraft books, and all of our
Usborne Collection Books. I also have been working diligently on collecting books from the
Memoria Press Read Aloud sets for their Enrichment books. Although all of those books would fall under my category of Classic Literature (and are marked accordingly with a light blue sticker) I also separated each of the different book lists into bins and included a print off of the booklist with the books that I already have highlighted. This makes it much easier to find them and know which books we have and ones that we are still looking for!
All of the children's homeschool textbooks and workbooks are in separate individualized
fabric bins in the corner unit (our homeschool curriculum plans for next year will be posted soon!). Above those are all of our homeschool books that we are not currently using, but other children will use them in the future.
I also tried to put books that our children would access on their own the most on the lowest levels of the bookshelves. All of the easy reader books, and easy chapter books including all of the
Boxcar Children and
Magic Tree House books are all near the bottom shelves. On the highest levels of the bookshelf are the books that we do not use all of the time like the Seasonal/Holiday books and more advanced Chapter Books that we currently use for read alouds.
There were a few books that I choose not to put on the big bookshelves in our
homeschool room. One of our favorite parts of our homeschool curriculum is using Catholic Mosaic as a guide to all of the wonderful books and activities. We read these books often throughout our days and have always had them in our front sitting room. They used to be all in a big basket but I brought up a old bookshelf from the homeschool room and now they fill the bottom two shelves in the sitting room.
Also in the sitting room I keep a magazine rack by one of our reading chairs where we keep all of our library books. I think this helps us not misplace them as we can have 20-30 books checked out from the library at any given time.
Upstairs in our children's bedrooms we also wanted to have a plan to promote independent reading while also having easy organization for books. In the big kids room we found that the best option was having bins rather than shelves near their bunk beds. They can easily throw books in the bins when they are done reading them or cleaning their room. We also have a big comfy chair where we read bedtime stories as a family. They also each have little bookshelves by each of their bunk beds for their individual books (we used
Ikea Spice Racks for these!) In our 3 year old's room there is an amazing building bookshelf. I kept all of our board books and preschool type books in his room so he has easy access to them whenever he wants and I can easily grab one to read when putting him down to a nap or bed.
I also had gotten an
Ikea Raskog cart to initially use for craft supplies, but when our children saw it they immediately exclaimed that it looked just like the library cart at our public library! We keep it by the bookshelf and as the kids read books throughout the day they put the books on the cart. Then they excitedly have the chore at the end of the day to return the books to their proper places. With the color coded sticker system it is really easy for even our little ones to put the books back to their proper places!
I am so excited to have this project completed and to have a system that works well for the books and little readers in our home! Happy reading time!
