Topic: It's All About The Books

Dedicating a section of the classroom library to mentor texts gives students the opportunity to access and choose the mentor texts that work best for them.

Clare Landrigan shares her template for a virtual classroom library, and shows you how to start digitally curating books for your students.

The PLC series continues with ways to reach literacy goals of increased reading access to books, and time spent reading and writing.

This past year I engaged in an informal teacher-researcher project focused on an unrelenting question in my mind about the range of text complexity in elementary classroom libraries.

There is a power to series books, and they should have a prominent space in our bookrooms and classroom libraries. Here are a bunch of new ways to hook those series readers in your classroom!

Just think how excited your students will be to see new books in the library. It adds a new spark and energy to reader’s workshop! Spring is around the corner!

The classroom library is the home of a class’ reading community. Like any remodeling project, it is best to make a plan that is real but achievable for the situation at hand. We always advise not to take on more than you can finish in the amount of time you have to do it.

Developing lifelong reading begins with books and we, as educators, have the power to make a school’s book supply seem endless in the eyes of its readers.

We can all agree that in the life of a reader, the right book at the right time makes all the difference. But how do we know which book? What time is the right time? How do we assess both a reader’s growth and identity? How do we fit it all in?

Here are a few ways literacy leaders can help support classroom teachers at the beginning of the school year.

As you make plans for a new year with your students, you might be thinking about your classroom library. How can you make your library more engaging for your students? What should you consider as you think about giving your classroom library a reboot?

While school libraries and bookrooms both house books to be shared and even may be located in the same physical space, in many schools they serve a different role for students and teachers.

Summer reading affects student achievement, and schools are working hard to find creative ways to get books into students’ hands. Following are a few different ways we have helped schools make summer reading possible for all students.

All author royalties from the sale of It's All About the Books are being donated to the Book Love Foundation, in order to impact as many teachers and students as possible. Book love is dedicated to teachers who inspire a love of reading.

Tammy and Clare show us that classroom libraries and book¬rooms are more than just storage places—they should be dynamic and kinetic. They show us that books are more than materials—they are the lifeblood of our classrooms.

We see bookrooms as the perfect solution to provide the depth and breadth of books a teacher needs to supplement a core curriculum. In It's All About the Books, we share our vision of how a bookroom can become a shared instructional resource that provides us with what we need.

Books are the heart and soul of teaching literacy and our tools to develop lifelong readers. So how can we organize books across an entire school community to support student choice AND instructional goals? And how do we do this on any budget?

This week on the Heinemann Podcast we welcome Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan, authors of It's All About The Books. From design, to inventory, to organizing, and using these books in the classroom—they demonstrate how to make the most of what you have, and how to get what you need on a budget.