Classroom Librarian

Not my favorite work from grad school, but worth sharing due to the love I had for my classroom library. When I submitted this paper, I included photographs of my library. Maybe on some day when I have time to waste, I will add them here as well.

Becoming a Better Classroom Librarian:
Application Paper

Prior to taking Reading Development and Instruction, my feelings were mixed about my classroom library. The number of books in my library compared to my colleagues made me proud, yet I knew amount was insignificant if students never read the materials. Routman’s chapter on classroom libraries in her book Reading Essentials also provoked mixed feelings. Her chapter chipped away at my pride making her suggestions a little hard to except at first. At first, pointing out what I could not try due to my high school restrictions was easier than looking at what I could do. However, I want my students to be enthusiastic about reading, so I tried some of her suggestions by making a few small changes. Now, with just minor changes, I am seeing significant results.

When working on my library, I figured that I had a lot of materials; my library contains about four hundred books of various genres as well as a generous supply of magazines and back issues of the school paper. So, I decided to focus my energy on making what I had better rather than working on gathering more materials at this time. Yet, my first change was bringing in all my unused books from home. When I looked at my books as a whole, I noticed that I chose the titles much more so than the students. To address Routman's suggestions about students helping in the selection of books and the books mirroring them (p. 166), I made a plan for going to yard sales and book sales this summer to find more books for my library so that I can add more books that my students are interested in, such as series they often mention like Maximum Ride, Gossip Girl, Twilight, and Cirque de Freak. Lastly, I began using the school library and the public library and interlibrary loan to supplement my own collection based on our current unit of study, which coincides with Routman's suggestion to “rotate, change, and add so the collection based on changing needs, interests, and curriculum” (p.167).

Routman recommends that teachers critically look at the organization of their library. The majority of my books were well organized; I had sections for young adult literature, adult fiction, some non-fiction, classics, poetry, plays, reference materials, and magazines. The problem was that all of these areas were not clearly differentiated or labeled for the students. So, when I brought in the new books, I designated bins for the smaller collections of comics, poetry, short stories, children’s / picture books, and school newspapers. I made large and colorful labels for these sections to increase the changes of students noticing them and thus finding what they want.

The major focus of the changes I made to my library, were to how it looks overall. Routman asks teachers to consider: “When you walk into your classroom, does the library or book nook jump out at your, or is it all but invisible? Does your library corner look beautiful and contain an inviting display of plentiful reading materials, or does it look bland and impoverished? (p. 166). While I had a lot of reading materials, they really did not jump out to a visitor of the classroom. My classroom design has all the shelves on the side of the room opposite the door. The student desks block most of these shelves and make the books blend into the background. Now, I can not change the placement of my shelves since they are built into the walls, but I decided to work on creating displays that exposed book covers to draw attention to the library.

I started revealing book covers by gathering books related to the literature circles titles the students just finished and arranging them on my “chalk” tray at the front of the room. I labeled these books either “Books your peers like” or “If you liked ______, you might like one of these.” My students definitely noticed the books. One student checked out a book the first day she saw the choices at the front of them room, and I saw several other students look at the books up close, reading the backs and such. I like having the books up front where they grab the students' attention, but I dislike having my marker tray monopolized. So, I plan on photocopying the rain gutters idea from Routman’s text (p. 78-9) and giving it to my principal with an explanation of the results I have seen so far. I hope this will persuade him to let me drill holes in the virgin walls and install rain gutters along the front and back of my room, under the white board and bulletin board.

In my first literacy class, I learned about making text sets for units, and since then I pull books from the shelves that related to our theme to create a display. However, I put these between bookends previously, but the kids never looked at them. Book spines are not interesting; they do not pull in students or catch their eye. So, I purchased twenty book easels. When I started my Huck Finn unit, I placed selected titles on the easels to display the covers. I put the rest of the theme based books in a bin in the center of the easels and arranged the books so that they could be flipped through to see the covers. This display is much more noticeable and interesting than just the book spines. When one enters the room, this display is noticed right away, unlike the shelves below. Even though no students have borrowed books from this section, I witnessed several students look at these books, which is an major improvement.

The electric pencil sharpener is located next to my unit based books in hopes of attracting the students' attention while the machine grinds away at their pencil. This time, I taped a question and answer article on the human black market to the counter next to the sharpener and placed Sold by Patricia McCormick and Dreams Freedom by Sonia Levitin on book easels around the article. I chose the topic of modern slavery because when we discuss Huck Finn my students so often refer to slavery existing “back then.” Soon after creating the display, a student, who had not checked out book from my room all year, asked if she could borrow Sold. She read it in less than a week and returned it. A few days after returning the book, she seemed very interested in Dream Freedom, while she waited for a friend who was talking to me after class. I started up some small talk with her about Dream Freedom and she left with that book that day. So, the pencil sharpener display has inspired one student to read two books in addition to Huck Finn to further her knowledge on a topic she knew little about before.

I had a few remaining book easels after creating my Huck Finn display, so I placed them around the room on different shelves of the library to display a single text from that section, much the way a regular library or bookstore does. No students have appeared to notice this change, but one of my colleagues who visits my room almost every day did. She saw Memoirs of a Geshia on one of the easels and asked to borrow it. Never before has a fellow teacher asked to borrow a book they saw in my room while visiting. So, even though no students have yet asked to check out those books, I know the book easels are drawing attention to the library shelves thus making them more appealing.

Often libraries and book stores have displays that show the recommendations or current reading lists of the people who work there. I decided to couple this idea with the ideas in Routman's chapter on sharing your reading life with students. I started small by adding stickers to the bindings of all the books I have read in my collection and hanging a mini white board on the wall that shows what I am currently reading. Next, I started to tell some of my classes about the book I was reading and how it was interesting to me. I could see the interest on their some of their faces. As the students began reading Huck Finn, I began reading Finn by Jon Clinch. This book retells the basic story of Huck Finn through Pap's point of view including filling in some gaps about Pap's past. When I told my classes about this book, I could see that some of the students found it really interesting that there was a book that explored these ideas about the text they were reading. Seeing the interest on students' faces has made me want to share with them about other books, so I have been reading other related texts while they read Huck Finn. When I first started teaching, I could not have done this because I devoted all my time to rereading the primary text the students were reading. Now that I have read Huck Finn annually for several years, I can spend time reading new books such as The Day They Came to Arrest the Book by Nat Hentoff and The Coffin Quilt by Ann Rinaldi, both of which I introduced to students today.

The biggest successes I witnessed occurred when I gave students my opinions on specific books and gear it towards what I would have wanted to know at their age. Having recently read Tod Strassser's The Wave, I was interested in reading his novel Give a Boy a Gun during April break. When we returned to school, I put it back on the tray with a post-it on the cover saying: “Mrs. Boyd read this over vacation. Fast read, but gory and violent in places.” Within ten minutes of class, a student asked what the post-it said. Within thirty seconds of me saying I thought they might like some of these books as I had them out and then dictating the post-it, a hand went up asking to put dibs on the book. When I saw this success, I got a second copy of the book and repeated; within a day the second copy was borrowed. So, I continued to label books with note cards or post-it notes to catch students’ attention. For example, the two previously mentioned books, The Day They Came to Arrest the Book and The Coffin Quilt, both have notes on them. The former book has a post-it on the cover saying, “If you are interested in book banning, you might want to read this one!” while the latter book has a note card in front of it letting students know how it relates to Huck Finn and pointing that we read a text earlier this year by the same author. I even put Alice in Wonderland on a book easel with a post-it about the Mad Hatter, since we mentioned that character in class when discussing the scene in Huck Finn where the bread with mercury in it is used to find the drowned body. These notes from me to the students are helping to convey my recommendations more clearly, thus peaking their interest in the texts.

I have also started to make more personal recommendations for individual students. In literature circles recently some of my students read Jerry Spineli's Stargirl. Two of my students expressed an interest in reading the sequel, so I located a copy and left notes in the office for the two girls who were interested. One of them came to get the book with in a class period. She finished the book in four days and passed it on to the other student today. I also recommended Sweetblood, a book about a girl who thinks her diabetes is really vampirism, to a diabetic vampire loving student. She thought it sounded like a cool concept and might check it out of the school library. A third example is another student stated she really liked Huck Finn and Ann Rinaldi's A Break with Charity. I recommended for her to read Rinaldi's The Coffin Quilt, which tells the story of the real feuding families satirized in Huck Finn, Hatfield and McCoys.

Aside from getting my students more interested in reading, these personal recommendations help me to bond with my students like Routman discussed in chapter two of her book. My husband says his favorite English teacher was a man who lent my husband his personal book about the existence of aliens, which was a topic he and his teacher sometimes chatted about together in class. My husband never forgot that teacher's attention to him as an individual. I hope that these recommendations will not only help re-energize reading for my students and broaden their interests, but also show them that I see them as individuals and care about their interest and personalities, just as my husband's teacher did for him.

These personal book recommendations also match students and books, which is another recommendation that Routman makes. One deterrents of reading for me when I was in middle school were book recommendations from the librarians which they liked, but had nothing to do with me. I loved stories, but had a hard time finding ones which interested me. I can make meaningful recommendations because I know my students both on their ability and interests. I want to continue to do this, but I am concerned that I personally have not read widely enough to reach many of my students. For example, I have not read many sports, science fiction, or fantasy books, which would be appealing to many of my male students. This is an area I want to continue to work on.

I look forward to applying some of Routman’s other ideas. One ideas in particular is to make a bulletin board of top ten books (p. 71). I am not yet ready to move fully to independent reading, but I think we could do this activity at the beginning of the year and then the end of each quarter. My students are influenced by their peers’ choices and I want to see more of that. As more students begin reading, I want to build in more class time for them to share what they are reading, which will in turn peak interests of their classmates. Additionally, I want to work on more reading time into my classes. Actual reading seems to be the big element missing in my room that libraries have because most of their reading is assigned as homwork.

Overall, through applying Routman's ideas to my classroom, I discovered that small changes can make a difference for individual students. I made my classroom library more appealing and thus drew in several students who are now more excited about reading. In addition, thinking of myself as a part librarian, I recommended books to students using my knowledge of their personality, which has also been meaningful and motivating for students. I look forward to trying more ideas in the fall which will continue to encourage my students to become enthusiastic about reading.


Works Cited
Routman, R. (2003). Reading Essentials. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.