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Bridget
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I was wondering, once you gather books for a unit do you put
them back on your shelves? Or do you store them grouped
together for the next round of kids to study that unit?
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Bridget, happily married to Kevin, mom to 8 on earth and a small army in heaven
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Elizabeth
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I wish I knew the answer to this one! After spending the better part of the morning searching for Brigid's Cloak the other day, I resolved to find a better system--or a system at all. All my reference and chapter books are shelved by subject. But my picture books are in children's rooms on shelves. Everyone has their personal favorites or books that were gifts and then there are crossover units--picture books that fit into more than one category...
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Elizabeth Foss is no longer a member of this forum. Discussions now reflect the current management & are not necessarily expressions of her book, *Real Learning*, her current work, or her philosophy. (posted by E. Foss, Jan 2011)
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Leonie
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I agree with Elizabeth that there are many crossover books wrt subjects.
We have picture books together. Easy readers together. Reference books together. That sort of thing.
Then a whole mess of books under "just books"! I like this because it allows my children to make their own connections - for example, not see the book about Fabre ( Children of Summer) as part of a Science unit but maybe connect it with a French study.
And when we are searching for books on a topic, I like the search - being drawn into perusing another book, finding something long forgotten, something else to read even if its not related to the topic we thought we were researching.
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Kelly
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Leonie wrote:
I agree with Elizabeth that there are many crossover books wrt subjects.
We have picture books together. Easy readers together. Reference books together. That sort of thing.
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We do this, too. However, we keep our picture books (well, most of them...) in crates so that the little guys can flip thru them more easily. We have the crates in a cozy little corner with lots of pillows, the so-called "Reading Nook". Within the crates we have a loose system, with a crate for science books, another crate for EZ readers, the rest are what Leonie calls the "Just Books" crates, I guess!
On the shelves, for the older readers, we have books roughly divided (and I do mean, roughly!) into Reference, Geography, Religion, Biographies (Religion and Biographies being next to each other since so many of our Religion books are saints biographies), Fiction (lots of those same "just books" kind of books), Science and a Living Science shelf. Up high I keep the books for Mom!
I would say that after a unit study, we put the books back in their respective sections. But truly, our books tend to migrate a lot, especially from shelves, floor-ward and bedroom-ward. However, I figure that Book Migration is the mark of a book that is being used, so it's a good thing. We do keep "just book" crates in all the kids rooms, too, and bookcases there for various kids' personal favorites. My dd would collapse if I tried to wrest her Redwall collection from her room, likewise my ds and his Hardy Boys!
Periodically we do a housewide Search and Rescue of all the books: a combination of locating, organizing, straightening, repairing, and repatriating the books to their original shelves and crates. Lots of aha moments, reacquainting and casual browsing tend to happen during this process.
Kelly in FL
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teachingmom
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In general, I end up keeping many of our unit books together even after the unit is over. Some end up migrating over time, but many stay close enough to where I last put them together to be of help. I have found that it helps us in particular each Thanksgiving when I can go to the shelf where all those books are and find them immediately.
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Patty
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Just a thought...after you've gathered the books for a unit together, you could make a computer list of the unit topic, all related books, with a note on which shelf or in which category each one is stored. Then file these lists in a file folder or notebook labeled Unit Studies for future reference. Not that I've ever done this! I tend to have a large stack of library books on a certain topic, with a few of ours added in. Just have to keep the library books together so we can return them, hopefully on time.
God bless,
Patty
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cashioncrew
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A dear homeschooling buddy and I just tackled this very issue and don't know if we have the answer, but I'll guess we'll see! She and I split a babysitter for 2 weeks and half the time ALL (and I mean All - we have 14 kids between the 2 of us) were at my house with the sitter and we were at her house organizing and the other half of the time, the kids and sitter were at her house and she and I organized my house! It wasn't near enough time but we got SO much done. Part of our organizing included a color system for our books. My problem was that I had books all over the house and didn't know what I had or where it was!  So she and I and her older two sons actually catagorized ALL of my books (took EVERYTHING out and put them in boxes labeled science, geography, religion, etc....) and then taped them with a color code system (using colored duck tape and before this I had no idea that duck tape came in so many colors!). It was hard work but SO helpful! If you'd like to know more you can email me personally and I'll tell you what we did. We even sub-catagorized some sections - like religion, we had sub catagories like Saint books, catechesis books, character/virtue books, etc... Now, even if the kids don't understand or know what the colored duck tape means, they can find where all those books are with the same color and put it back where it belongs! It is great! I went duck tape crazy and can't stand when a book has no tape on it ! All of this was to say that now that we are starting to use FIAR, our idea was to put some color on the top of the spine to identify that it was a FIAR unit study book so it would stand out on the shelf (all of the tape colors went on the bottom of the book for our other categories). It's like a Dewey decimal system with colors instead of numbers!!  Then I even went one step further (and color crazy) and got colored folders so that any info., work sheets, etc.... that relate to that subject go in matching colored folders - easy to identify. My girlfriend has made me color crazy  - good thing I'm not color blind !
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cashioncrew
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Oh and I forgot to add that our ultimate goal is to enter all of our books in a spreadsheet in Excel with all the categories and sub-categories so we can search by subject to see what I have in my personal library to use for unit studies - but this will be an on-going project !
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Stephanie dh Trey (16 years), 4 ds (9,5,3,3) and 2 dd (8,3)
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Kelly
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Boy, am I impressed! I love the idea, though I balk a little at putting tape on my beloved books . That being said, I *have* written dates on the spines of my pb saints books so I'll know who to read when we're studying various historical eras. I'm really impressed at this organization, though. Let us know how the system works as time wears on... You may have hit on something!
Kelly, disorganized in FL
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cashioncrew
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Kelly-
I, too, was not crazy about putting the tape on my precious books, but even over time, you can carefully take off the tape without tearing or destroying the book!(my girlfriend has had the tape on her books for a long time!) Duck tape is very, very friendly! I'll let you know how the system works, if at all !
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Stephanie dh Trey (16 years), 4 ds (9,5,3,3) and 2 dd (8,3)
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Meredith
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WOW! I am really inspired and impressed Stephanie  Can you come to my house and help me too  I love your idea of splitting the babysitter and doing houses together! I use the colors that Sonlight sends with their cores to differentiate, but why not do EVERYTHING! Genius at it's best. Thanks for your great post!
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Meredith
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mrsgranola
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Well, this is a good topic for me. I'm doing inventory of ALL our books with Readerware software. I started when we were in the other rental house, going box by box. So far I've got about 1300 inventoried. It's been fun and eye-opening. I have managed to give some to the local library and to decide to sell some. I've also given a whole box to our LLL lending library that were on the approved for lib. list by LLLI. And I still have a box or two sitting here to sell.
I hope to label my shelves like ya'll are saying. I will put the sewing books in the new sewing room, cookbooks are in the built-in shelf in the dining room and everything else on the bookcases by non-fiction and fiction with subcategories...
JoAnna
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Erin
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To share what I've done-
I have many books!! And it would be a nightmare if I didn't have a system.
I have my books grouped by bookcases ie. All Australian books on one bookcase, science and nature on another, religious bookcase of children's and one of adults', a history bookcase -always overflowing. Poetry, maths and more textbooky ones on another case, then there is the reference bookcase and a couple of literature bookcases, plus of course the children have their one sets in therir rooms. And the picture books are all together.
I find that this is really a great system. I know what I've got. Also many of the local homeschoolers borrow my books so I can grab them easily when a friend rings and says, "I'm doing Greece what have you got?" (If lending out books I suggest buying a book and writing down the books before you lend them, I always was forgetting what I'd lent out or to whom)
And then on each bookcase I have also grouped books ie. on my history shelves I have, all Rome together, all Middle Ages together etc. authors as well.
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Bridget
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I've always thought a palm pilot, or whatever those hand held computers are, would be the perfect system to inventory books in. Then you can have it with you when you are in a book store, conference or where ever.
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Bridget, happily married to Kevin, mom to 8 on earth and a small army in heaven
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ALmom
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I love the idea of duct tape. We already have our shelves loosely organized by science, math, history, religion, etc. But so many could fit in different categories - ie literature sometimes crosses over into history and biography can be science, religion, history, etc. With colored duct tape, the youngers could find the right place on the shelf to restore order and if a book fit more than one category it could be shelved on the most appropriate shelf but have an identifier on the spine for all categories that it fit. I also like the idea of putting time period and perhaps location on biographies, lives of saints and historical fiction. Thanks for the great ideas. We'll see how long it actually takes to implement but wow, I can see order out of chaos.
Janet
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cashioncrew
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Janet-
After reading your post I am having a big laugh at my tired post on "duck" tape - quack, quack ! I need to start posting at earlier hours when the few brain cell s I have are more active. 
The taping went really fast with the older kids helping - faster than I thought! Good luck and God Bless. All my ducklings are in bed and I need to be too! 
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Stephanie dh Trey (16 years), 4 ds (9,5,3,3) and 2 dd (8,3)
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Kelly
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ALmom wrote:
I love the idea of duct tape...if a book fit more than one category it could be shelved on the most appropriate shelf but have an identifier on the spine for all categories that it fit.
Janet |
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I'm always looking for quick no-brainer cues that I can follow at a glance as well as the children With that in mind, how about the most appropriate "shelving category" being the top colored piece of duct tape, and the colors under it being the cross referenced categories it fit? Also, you could write the date for historical novels or biographies on the duct tape (instead of defacing your books' spines, like I have done on occasion, out of desperation!)
Kelly in FL
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Meredith
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OK so WHERE does one find all this colorful duct tape???  I'm sure it's in a *sea* of tape at the Home Depot store, of which I try not to enter unless begged to do so by my hubby  .
I really like the cross-ref idea because we use some different literature curriculums, eg. FIAR, Sonlight, etc. that it would be nice to have them labeled logically. Did that make sense, need more coffee here
This is a great thread, keep those ideas coming and thanks.
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Meredith
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cashioncrew
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Well girls... this is what Kimberly and I did in a nutshell. (FYI: The duct tape can be purchased at Wal-Mart in the paint section.)We did almost exactly what you suggested Kelly, except that we had the "major" category on the bottom and the tape was somewhat bigger and then the subcategory was slighty smaller (or more narrow probably) piece of tape. So for ex., our religion section is white (large tape on bottom of spine) and one of our subcategories was "saints" - we chose purple and placed a more narrow strip of the purple tape above the white and therefore all saint-related books are purple and white. Another subcategory was catechesis & prayer books - we used smaller piece of green tape above the white and so on .... Does that make sense? It really doesn't matter what color system you use, just as long as it makes sense to you! We wrote a master list of major subjects and subcategories with their color coordinates just so we could remember because you can start going crazy. So that helped alot! It doesn't matter if the kids "get" your system or not (but mine can remember better than me what it all means)! They just have to know that their IS a system and to please put the book back with its color family! The duct tape comes in the following colors at our Wal-Mart: red, silver, black, green, yellow, white, brown, purple (Advent books, of course  ), blue and Oh, camoflouage (sp?). We didn't use that last one, YET ! Anyway, I LOVE this system. It has given me such a sense of order and peace. Now, I can look at a book and I don't have to think about where it goes or what it is about! I love the idea of putting dates for historical and biography books. I don't know if you could write it on some of the duct tape colors because they are so dark, but you could use a labeler (my favorite tool in the house )! And, it would probably show up nicely. This was a great summer project and, like I've said before, your older kids can be a great help and it's educational fun (sometimes it was hard to keep them working because they stopped to read!) Thanks for the additional ideas and happy labeling!
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Stephanie dh Trey (16 years), 4 ds (9,5,3,3) and 2 dd (8,3)
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Kimberly
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Stephanie did a great job explaining this system! One thing I would add is that the books always end up oriented the same direction. In other words, the kids automatically put the binding on the outside and the colored tape on the bottom - with all the same colors grouped together.
Another thing I have enjoyed is how we subcategorized the general reading books. We have a group of books for teaching pre-school concepts (big blue tape, little white tape). Another section is the easy readers (big blue, little green). Middle readers are signified with a big blue tape and little red tape. Advanced readers are indicated with a big blue tape and little black tape. The readers I refer to are all picture books. I have not yet taped our chapter books except for chapter books that are in our history section. I love, for example, being able to tell one of our kids to pick a book from the blue/green section - knowing that a book in that section will be age appropriate (not that they are limited to that section by any means).
Our primary category tapes are ~1" tall, the secondary category is ~1/2". It works out nicely for 2" duct tape.
I would welcome ideas for subcategorizing chapter books. I find that once a child becomes a proficient reader, they enjoy reading easy and difficult chapter books. Would it benefit me or them to have some sort of organization for the chapter books? Any ideas?
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Kimberly Kocmoud
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4Real Forums : Planning and Ordering our Days
Topic: Storing Related Books
