Revisiting the Organization of My Balanced Literacy Room

I have added hundreds of books to my classroom library since the beginning of the year. The students have created their own book categories. I have finally found a spot to keep my teaching materials. This is not a very insightful post, but I know I like seeing how other classrooms are organized for Balanced Literacy. I hope you can take something away from mine.

 

I decided to put all of my Balanced Literacy teaching materials together on one bookcase. I meet with my literacy teammates twice a week and I am also a member of my school's Balanced Literacy team, so I need easy access to all of my materials. Also if a colleague borrows something it is easy for them to return to the correct place. My DIBELS and DRA assessment kits are on the top. In the cubbies underneath I house all of the books for my book clubs to use during the year. Since I am just starting out on the Balanced Literacy journey, I do not have many books for the clubs yet. I have found that by putting them in these separate cubbies I am able to see which clubs most need books.  This way when my facilitator or even classroom parents ask me if there are any books I need, I can take a quick visual inventory and give a quick answer.

 

Students created a Sports Basket.

 

I have added many new books since August, so I had to divide my leveled books in to picture book baskets and chapter book baskets.

 

I teach two blocks of literacy each day. My morning block is an inclusion group so the reading levels range from an A to a Q!

 

Students came up with the Books About Rodents basket and the Wings! basket.  We had so many books about cats and dogs that we had to divide them into picture books and chapter books.

 

Objects in the Sky was one of the units the students were studying in the Science Lab, so we created that basket.  I also used to teach Math so I pulled out all of my books with Math links and leveled them.

 

I have five cooperative group tables in my classroom. Each table has a Writing Tub that contains a dictionary, thesaurus, rhyming dictionary, punctuation and grammar handbooks, lists of commonly misspelled words, and any other type of spelling/writing/grammar book I have collected over the years. Each table has a Writing Captain that is in charge of getting the tub for students to use during Writing Workshop.