Creating a Leveled Library

After years of considering it my elementary school decided last spring to create a school-wide leveled library. Of course, as a teacher librarian, I have always believed in housing resources in a library, so I have been very excited to participate. We have about 30 classrooms in our K-4 school. When teachers purchase booksets for their guided reading groups they use a variety of funding methods, from curriculum money to donations to their own classroom funds. It has always seemed to me that if we could pool these resources everyone would have a wider range of levels and number of books to use.

One of our first challenges was in determining our philosophy for this leveled library. Each school needs to set their own parameters. Our philosophy set an expectation that every teacher/grade level would put every book set in the collection unless it was a title used primarily for curriculum use and used by every teacher in their grade level. Teachers kept their libraries of individual books in their own classrooms. We all agreed that certain author studies and titles would still be set aside, but we took on the belief that through our leveled library we are attempting to use these booksets for specific instruction directly at each group's instructional reading level and consequently children would not be repeating instruction in the same book from year to year, as it would no longer be in their level.

We chose to level our books with the Fountas and Pinnell guided reading leveling system. Most of the teachers had already labeled their books with Accelerated Reader levels, and we kept those in place so students would be able to continue using AR.

Fortunately we have a classroom into which shelves will be set up, and all books will be stored in tubs. We decided to catalog each book, and are just finishing that time-consuming process. As of today we have leveled, labeled and cataloged over 8000 books!

It is my belief that my role as teacher librarian is to be an active participant on this committee. I have been involve in the planning every step of the way, and I'm so glad that I have been! As the work continues I'll share a little more with you about how the process is coming along, but for now suffice it to say that we're creating a wonderful resource for our staff. And isn't that what it's all about?

Some of the many, many booksets that have already been entered into Follett's Destiny Program.

Wonderful PME teachers learning to catalog books!

The teachers hard at work!

Stacks of books that had been cataloged and are ready for the next step.

And now I am completing the work on the cataloging. There were many errors to clean up, but as time goes by I am able to resolve more and more issues and make locating and utilizing materials in this collection easier. 

Our Leveled Library is based on Fountas & Pinnell's Guided Reading leveling system. If you're interested in seeing how I cataloged our leveled readers, simply send an email and I'd be happy to share.