Picture Book Shelving Arranged by Subject

Last year, we started to have overcrowding problems in our picture book area, making it harder for our students to browse easily.

Fortunately, our school's furniture budget hadn't been fully spent and I made a good case for how useful new shelving could be.  I asked for different shelving for our non-fiction area, which I'll talk about in another post.  I also asked for new browser bins for our picture book area, which would replace the display shelves and increase the amount of storage space for our picture books.

I decided to use the additional browser bins to implement an idea I'd been thinking about for a while.  I had read about a few libraries which had classified their picture books using subjects rather than the alphabet and I could see the benefits of doing this.  I was keen to enable our teachers to quickly find books related to particular areas they might find useful in their classrooms.  I could see some problems though, namely trying to get all the books to fit neatly into the subject areas when there is the potential for lots of overlaps.  I decided to use both systems - keeping the existing alphabetical shelving, and using the new browser bins to put a subject-based system into effect.

I decided to coincide the change with our stocktake so we had a few months to think about what subjects we wanted.  It also meant that we could add an extra day or two after our stocktake and do all the physical changes needed in both the picture book and non-fiction areas.

Once I had chosen the subject areas, I assigned them different coloured stickers to identify where the books would be shelved. We started by labelling new books with their appropriate stickers, then nearer to the stocktake date we moved on to labelling some of the existing books.  Once labelled we kept them in piles in my office. We changed the location on our library management system (Access-it) to 'Picture Books - (name of subject)'.  Then I realised that to find the location if you've searched for the book, you have to click on the book and then click again to go into the copy information. To make it easier I decided to change the book 'type' from just 'Picture Book' to 'Picture Book - (name of subject)'.  This means that you can see the location information as soon as you click on the book title. It also means that I can easily generate data relating to the circulation of these particular books.

After the stocktake was done we put all the picture books we wanted to reclassify into their subject areas. Once we had all the books in their piles, I realised that one of my proposed subjects, 'Concepts' didn't have very many books. Meanwhile, a second category, 'Nature and Technology', was very large and diverse. I decided to combine 'Concepts' with 'Maths' and split 'Nature and Technology' into two areas - 'Nature' and 'Science and Technology'. Fortunately, we hadn't labelled a lot of these books and were able to make the changes without too much effort.

Here are my final subject areas:

Maths & Concepts
Maths - includes counting, time, shapes
Concepts - includes colours, patterns, opposites, size, perspectives

English & History 
- includes reading, writing, ABCs, wars

Nature 
- includes animals, life cycles, environment

Science & Technology 
- includes inventing, internet safety, engineering

Wordless Picture Books

Maori Culture & Language 
- includes bilingual

Feelings & Life Issues 
- includes mindfulness

Fairy Tales & Fractured Fairy Tales

Diverse Books 
- includes different cultures, special needs, different types of families


We already had a bay for Maori language books. I decided to expand this to include books in English that dealt with Maori culture as I felt it would be useful for teachers to easily access these.

I know 'Wordless Picture Books' is not really a subject, but I wanted teachers to be able to easily find these books. I ran a session for my Teachers' Reading Group on how to use them earlier on in 2019. Here are my slides. I'm hoping to run a session on using Fractured Fairy Tales later on this year.

Esther made temporary signage for each area. I want to get some professionally printed along with our new non-fiction signs.

We only had a week left of school after the stocktake and shelving changes were made so I delayed formally introducing the teachers to the new system. I have a slot during one of the Teacher Only days this week when I will do this.

When we opened the library again at lunchtimes we realised that the smallest children might have difficulty with the height of the new browser bins. I decided to purchase a small step for them to use. There wasn't a lot of choice, a lot of the steps I found were actually to help children reach the toilet and were quite flimsy and not likely to stand up to frequent use. I ended up buying an aerobic step, so I've been joking that I can use it at lunchtime if I need some exercise.

We've been opening the library for one afternoon a week during the holidays, and it's been lovely to see parents making use of the new sections. We had one parent come up and ask if we had any books about maths and we were able to direct her to the 'Maths and Concepts' section. I've also had enquiries in the past about whether we have books relating to autism, and these can now be easily found in the 'Diverse Books' section. I hope that all our new sections will be helpful to our parents and teachers.

Update: Yesterday I spoke to our teachers and talked about the new subject areas in our picture book area.  As I spoke the teachers started spontaneously clapping!  I think it's fair to say that they are very happy with the changes :)

2022 Update - We've done away with the A-Z surname shelving altogether!  Find out more here.

Displaying your Reading History

Last year, I started displaying the covers of the books I was currently reading.  Here's what I was reading last week:

This display has generated a bit of interest.  Recently, I've had students ask me why it's taking me so long to read "The Heroes of Olympus" series!  (In my defence, I've been listening to the audiobook versions only while exercising and doing chores and I obviously don't do enough of either of these things!).  

Fortunately, once I'd finished reading a book and had removed the cover from this display, I kept it.  I thought I might have a use for it someday.

A few months ago, I saw a post from librarian Zac McCallum, on the NZ school library listserv.  Zac has a wall filled with ALL the books he has read so far this year.  It looks colourful and interesting, and given I had most of my covers in a pile already, it was easy for me to implement.  I put them on my door:

I had no idea how much interest this would generate.  Far more than my "currently reading" display.  It is a great way to show students, and teachers, the amount and variety of children's books I read.  Many have asked about particular books, and have gone on to read them themselves.  I make sure that I only include books that are in our library (well, except for "Illegal" by Eoin Colfer, I put that up but I'm still deciding whether I think it is suitable for a Year 1-6 primary.  If you've read it, I'd love to hear what you think).  I do read a lot of children's books from our public library, but if they're not good enough for me to buy for our school library I don't put them on my door.  I also don't include picture books (too many!) or the YA and adult books I read.

This display has given me some unexpected benefits:

• When asked to recommend a book, I have a quick way to remember all the good books that I've read so far this year.  
• I can point out a cover as I talk about a book so a student can see what it looks like.
• I'm finding filling up the door surprisingly motivational!  It is quite satisfying to move a cover from the "currently reading" display onto the door.  And it is pleasing to see the space on the door filling up!

I am really pleased with how successful this display has been and would highly recommend doing it.

At the end of the year, I'm going to take a photo of the door (and possibly the adjoining windows if I fill the door up) before removing all the covers.  

I'm also thinking that I should promote this idea to the teachers in our Teachers' Reading Group when we meet again early next term.  Earlier this year, I encouraged them to display the covers of the books they have read aloud, and some of them have been doing that.  Displaying the books they have read themselves would take it one step further (and perhaps encourage them to read more children's books).

Teachers' Reading Group - The First Five Sessions

At the end of May, I started a Teachers' Reading Group at my school.  I have nine teachers who attend fortnightly, on either a Tuesday at lunchtime or a Wednesday after school.  Interestingly, of the nine there are three teachers who are in their first year, at our school and in teaching.  This is actually all of our first-year teachers, so I had a 100% success rate signing up that group.  It is a shame though, that it appears that they're not being introduced to more children's authors as part of their teaching qualification. 

I also have two teachers in the 1-3 year category, and four who have been teaching for over ten years (including one who has taught for over thirty), so I have a wide range of experience levels.

I selected each of the topics for the meetings from the "Building Communities of Readers" booklet by Teresa Cremin, Marilyn Mottram, Fiona Collins and Sacha Powell.

First Meeting

Our first meeting was on "widening knowledge of children's authors and contemporary writers".  We went over more of the teacher questionnaire results.  In particular, we talked about how a lot of teachers had written the names of authors who were their childhood favourites, and there was a lack of current writers.

I gave the teachers copies of reading for pleasure research (from my earlier presentation at a staff meeting).  I wanted them to always have that to remind them of the importance of reading for pleasure.

Everyone signed up to Goodreads and we set a goal to have read a book by the next meeting.  I brought some good books from our library, as I've done at each of the meetings since then.  I take a piece of paper and record the barcodes so I know what's gone where.

Second Meeting

This meeting was about "reflecting upon personal reading histories and current practices and exploring consequences for classroom practice".  However, it started with sharing the books that we had read (which we do at every session) and then going over a few of the results from the student surveys I had helped our teachers carry out prior to the meeting (I ended up doing eight classes - 200 children).

It was surprising that within each class there was a range of answers to the same question.  For example, in each class some students thought their teacher read aloud every day and some thought it was less than once a week!  We talked about individual class results, which showed that when teachers read aloud more often (as indicated by the answers from the majority of students), their students were more likely to believe their teachers definitely read and that they love reading.  

The teachers went on to discuss the difficulty in protecting read aloud time when other things encroached on it, and shared ideas for dealing with that.

Then we looked at our personal reading histories and how they could be shared with students - doing things like talking about the books we liked when we were children, or bringing in old books from home.  During the conversation, one of the teachers mentioned that she did reading recovery as a child.  I asked how she felt about sharing that with her students and she said she hadn't thought about it but was happy to do so.

At the end of this meeting, I took a photo so I could share it on the library's Facebook page and let our school community know what we are up to.

Third Meeting

Our third meeting was about "planning, organising and sustaining regular opportunities for children to read independently for pleasure".  We talked about the opportunities children have to read independently for pleasure, where they get to read, and how it gets worked into the school day.

We also looked at the questions in the student questionnaire about whether students liked reading, whether they thought they were any good at it and whether they read with anyone at home.  We discussed the fact that 66% of our students read more at home.  The most common reasons they gave were because they have more time, their favourite books are there, it's quieter and they're more comfortable.  The students who read more at school felt they did so because "it is a subject" (in other words they have to!), because it's busy at home and because there are more books at school.

We talked about ways to encourage children to discuss their reading with each other.  I shared something that I'd seen work well for a teacher several years ago.  She sat her students down in the library and before they returned their books she gave them time to talk about them with each other.  A lot of teachers from our Teachers Reading Group have now been doing this with their classes and it is very successful.

Fourth Meeting

At this meeting we looked at "extending knowledge of children's comics and magazines".  I brought in a huge selection of graphic novels and we browsed through these.  I'd recently been looking at the borrowing histories of some of our "priority readers" and could see that several had found their passion for graphic novels.  I talked about some of the more popular graphic novel series that had hooked these developing readers.

During this session a Year 2 teacher reported back about what happened when she talked to her class about her own reading journey.  I found her story really heart-warming, so I asked if she could write something so I could share it, and here it is:

This week I shared with my Year 2 class how I found it hard to read when I was little and that a beautiful lady, Mrs Howl, helped me to learn to read.  This created a discussion about Paula's role when she comes into our class at reading time to help some students.  The discussion took many directions with the tamariki [children] saying "we read together to help each other".   One beautiful 6-year-old said, "wow, if you didn't learn to read then you wouldn't be able to be our teacher and teach us how to read".  Another boy said, "as long as you try your best you can learn to read or do anything".  I shared that is why I love to read as the passion and support from Mrs Howl made me want to keep trying to learn to read.  This meant that after lots of hard work I was able to read my own chapter book and now any book I wanted.  Year 2's are so fantastic and it was definitely inspiring sharing my own reading journey.  I observed some of my students sitting on the mat listening with big smiles on their faces.  It was a beautiful, honest, feel-good moment that I will remember so thank you Michelle for inspiring me to share my history with my class.

This teacher said that in particular some of her lower achieving students were very inspired by hearing her story.

Fifth Meeting

The fifth meeting was about "discovering useful information about children's out-of-school reading habits, cultures and practices".  We talked about valuing all kinds of reading - online, paper-based, recipes, signs, receipts, games etc.  I shared the idea of reading rivers and gave them some handouts about it, including Jon Biddle's example on the Research Rich Pedagogies website.  I also showed them the one I had made.

A reading river is where you record everything that you read over the course of 24 hours or a weekend.  It helps the children to notice how much they are reading when they don't realise it.  It's also really good for teachers to get an idea of what kids are reading at home.  Our teachers were very enthusiastic about this, they liked the idea of putting reading rivers up on display so students' peers could see what they are reading.

I was pleased to see that one of the teachers took this idea and shared it back with the other teachers in her team.  The impact of the Teachers' Reading Group is moving wider and I'm really happy about that!


As we have gone along the teachers have got to know one another better (none of them are from the same team and several are new to the school).  We have had some great discussions around reading, not always directly related to what we've been covering!  I'm learning a lot and the cross-team pollination of ideas has been wonderful.

Teachers' Reading Group - Getting Started

Late last year, I read an excellent book called "Building Communities of Engaged Readers: Reading for Pleasure" by Teresa Cremin, Marilyn Mottram, Fiona M. Collins, Sacha Powell and Kimberly Safford.  The book is based on two studies by the UKLA (United Kingdom Literacy Association) on teachers' knowledge of children's literature, and how they can improve it and build reading communities in their classrooms. 

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to fly to England and research reading for pleasure.  I met with Teresa Cremin and heard her keynote at the UKLA National Conference.  She was very inspirational and it was a highlight of my trip.  I was really keen to share her work with the teachers at my school.  I felt it would be an excellent way to work with teachers and help them to better help their students foster a love of reading.

Less than a week after I returned from England, I persuaded our DP to let me attend a staff meeting and administer Teresa's Teachers as Readers questionnaire (choose the 'Review your practice" tab).  This is part of the Open University's Research Rich Pedagogies website.  I copied the questionnaire and made a couple of little adjustments (like changing 'literacy coordinator' to librarian).  I didn't want the teachers to do it online as I wanted to collect the results myself.  

Part of the questionnaire has the teachers name six children's authors, six children's poets and six children's picture book authors/illustrators.  I had several teachers come up to me later on to tell me that they had remembered more names after they handed in their questionnaire, or that they were embarrassed that they couldn't name more authors.  One put a little sad face directly on her questionnaire!  It definitely got them thinking about their knowledge of authors.

My main aim for administering the questionnaire was to initiate our own Teachers as Readers project at my school.  I was told this would need to be voluntary; I would have to convince our teachers to give up their own time to be part of this project.

The following term, I was able to get ten minutes to talk about my trip at a staff meeting.  I  chose two things to talk about, that I thought would be of particular interest to teachers - Empathy Lab (see my SLANZA conference slides to find out more about that) and Teachers as Readers.  

I started by emphasising the importance of reading for pleasure.  I shared some research from the OECD (Slide 2 below).  This had quite an impact - I could hear mutterings and surprised comments arising from it.  I also shared other research (Slide 3), showing the impact reading for pleasure has on academic achievement.  I talked about the fact that reading is not just learning to read, but wanting to read.  The will as well as the skill.

Then I talked about the Teachers as Readers work done by Teresa and her team.  I reported back about the results from the questionnaire (Slides 6-8).  I compared our results with those from the 1,200 UK teachers that Teresa's team surveyed.  We were quite similar in our knowledge of writers, worse when it came to knowledge of children's poets, and better in our knowledge of children's picture book writers/illustrators.  Then I shared the conclusion from Teresa and her team based on the results of the research (Slide 9):

I talked about phase two of the Teachers as Readers research, which was a project to help widen teachers' knowledge of children's literature and build communities of readers in their schools (Slide 10). 

Then I flicked over to the last bit of our research (Slide 11).  This was our teachers' own rating of their repertoire of children's books.  Only 25% of them gave themselves a seven or more.  I said that I felt that they should all be aiming for a seven or above, for the reason I showed them in Slide 9 - to support their students in their development as readers they need to have a good reading repertoire.  I said that if they were interested in improving their rating, I would be running our own Teachers as Readers project.  I went over this in Slide 12.  I didn't want to put them off by talking about the questionnaires involved or the length of the project, but I did want them to know what they were signing up for.

I sent them out an email after the staff meeting, with a Google doc attached so they could indicate what the best times were for our Teachers' Reading Group, and how often they wanted to meet.  And then I crossed my fingers!  I was hoping for four teachers, one from each of our Year 3-6 teams.  I got nine!  They teach from Year 1-6 (in fact, one was a new entrant teacher who didn't even have any students yet!).  I also have another two teachers who can't attend in real life but did join our Goodreads group.

I ended up with two Teachers' Reading Groups, as I didn't want to have to turn anyone away.  I have a Tuesday lunchtime group and a Wednesday after school group.  The consensus was for fortnightly meetings, which has worked well.  Having the two days has also proved useful, as we've had teachers switch between the two as commitments come up.

So, I started with the questionnaire and that highlighted the gaps in some teachers' knowledge and made them feel uncomfortable.  Then I showed them the research that proved why it's important, and I think those two things really helped get teachers on board.

In my next post I'm going to summarise what we covered in our first five sessions.  The "Building Communities of Readers" booklet is a big help if you are going to run Teachers' Reading Groups as it goes through what you can cover in each session.

I am SO pleased with how things are going - I am having lots more conversations about books and reading with teachers, even those not in my Teachers' Reading Groups!  I think running the project has positioned me as an expert in children's literature and reading for pleasure in a really visible way.  There has also been some lovely feedback from the teachers about the impact on their students.

Another benefit that arose after I administered Teresa's questionnaire on our staff, was that I encouraged our principal to promote reading by having his photo taken each week while reading various picture books.  This has proved a popular segment on our library's Facebook page.