Staff who volunteered to start their class libraries participated in a half day Professional Development (PD) session run by Sally. The morning session was for the Middle/Upper Primary teachers and the afternoon was for the Junior Primary teachers. We started with some professional independent reading from Regie Routman’s book “Reading Essentials”, focusing on Chapter 5 – Organising an Outstanding Classroom Library. From this reading, teachers then brainstormed: What is a Classroom Library? What do we want it to look like/what do we want it to be?
A Classroom Library needs to have:
- a minimum of 250 books
- lots of different genres
- books that are age appropriate
- baskets of books organised into genres borrowed from the school library
- coloured boxes of broadbanded, levelled texts for independent and take home reading
Using Post It notes, we brainstormed then sorted what sorts of books we would like to borrow from the school library to have in our Classroom Library, discussing age appropriate texts, what stages of reading development were the students in our class, topics/authors that students are interested in, etc.
The next part of the session was to walk around to each person’s classroom and talk about where the Classroom Library may go, how were books going to be organized and displayed, how would the Classroom Library be the central hub, how to make it comfortable and inviting, etc.
After the walk, we discussed, listed and prioritized: What do we need to do to prepare our students when we implement Classroom Libraries? Teachers also made a commitment to collect baseline data on their students. Agreement was made to start by interviewing 3 students about their reading behaviours, interests, strategies, support at home, etc. Teachers formulated questions to ask students in this reading interview and some of these are listed in the chart below.
To conclude the session, teachers were asked to rate their responses to the following questions using scattergraphs: How prepared/supported do you feel to begin? How excited/motivated are you to implement your Classroom Library?