Bookshelf Update

So far, to look at my books, you'd see a bigger mess than before. But I'm actually making some small progress. And, one nice thing about taking pictures of my shelves, it made me see that there is more empty space on there to work with than I thought. I probably don't need to buy more shelves as soon as I was thinking, even with a bunch of new school books on the way.

When I was reading this post, she talked about Guided Reading levels. I'd never heard of those before, and it turns out that they are NOT phonetic, but they do seem to do a pretty good job of separating the books out so that we can find some that are do-able. Schoolastic has a book wizard that you can look titles up, and there's lots of titles that are not levels for this Guided Reading, but I'm finding that some of our books are leveled, and so I'm pulling those out and putting them in a special place with stickers on the back of them so that he can easily tell what level they are at. I'm also hitting up my friends for empty cereal boxes so that I can create containers to put the various levels in. Kinda like the ones from that post I like so much. We usually get bagged cereal, so I have no boxes laying around, and even if we switch for a bit, it's going to take some time to get very many boxes. But if I hit my friends up for boxes I can probably get a few in pretty short order so that I can get started. Mom uses boxes, cut like magazine holders and covered with contact paper, in her classroom, and says that they hold up pretty well, so that's what I'm starting with.

The other exciting thing I've discovered since my first post about my books is an app for my iPhone that will help me to categorize my books and keep a list of what I do and don't have. I can tag them with multiple tags and then I'll have a list of what I already have when I'm book shopping. I've tried out the "lite" version and it's simple, easy, and quick to use. I can't wait to get the full version!

And, a little down the road when I've got my easy readers settled, I'll probably swipe Celestia's idea for organizing the school books. That's just what I need. 

As much as I'd like to think otherwise, this is going to be a pretty long-term project. That much is becoming clear already. But, I'm starting to have a plan, and that's an important step!