Adding Book Baskets To Our Library! Find The Materials and Directions Here, Friends.

 

We are always looking for new ways to engage and excite all readers within our school library. 

We do this through special book displays; book placement on the tops and within the shelves; rotating books; front face books; signage; book review bubbles; highlighting new books and series; and so much more. 

It's one of the BEST parts of being a teacher librarian. 

Over the last month, we have changed some things around, like the new nonfiction shelf dividers we added. You can read all about them here.

By making these changes and purchasing two new taller shelves, we have two shorter shelves to now use for something I have wanted to do for a long time...Book Baskets! 

I love how book baskets can highlight special and popular series, genres, new books, favorite authors and illustrators, publishers, special events and more. 

To start, we added 24 new book baskets on the two shorter shelves and...

...sprinkled several more throughout the fiction and nonfiction shelves in the library. 

I found these baskets on Amazon. You can order them in sets of 6. 

After we picked which series and books would go into the baskets, 

I made a list and labels for the baskets. 

I used Canva to create the labels. I just set the custom dimensions to 2 x 8 and...

...duplicated the design for each.  I found an image that represents each book series or topic and added that to the label too. 

When I was all finished, I downloaded the designs and printed them on a full sheet of label sticker paper. You can find it here. 

We want the labels to be extra strong because we are going to be switching them around throughout the year. So, I put the labels on a heavy piece of white cardstock and layered that onto a heavy piece of black cardstock. I put them on the paper cuter to make everything was nice and neat. 

When they were all ready, I laminated every label. 

When the labels were ready, we added a piece of adhesive piece of velcro to the back of the label. 

We added the other side of the velcro to the basket.  

The velcro will allow us to switch out the labels easily.  

One of the most important parts of our new book baskets are that we can rotate the focus of each book basket throughout the year.  We want to keep them exciting and interesting for our readers, while tying into what is happening within the library, classrooms, community and world. 

I just ordered 12 more baskets and these will be hitting the fiction shelves. We will pull out a few of our graphic novels series, more Michael Dahl series, books for summer reading and more. 

And this summer, when we get ready to open our library in the fall, we will take a close look at our book baskets to see what circulated, what didn't and what we could do different.  I am excited for the difference this will make in our library.  I can't wait to ask our students what they think too!