Listen. Connect. Empower.

Last summer I took the plunge I had been contemplating for years and I genre-fied the fiction section of our library. I weighed the pros and cons: Pros Easier browsing More student-centered More student independence "New" books of interest are developed Cons Why ditch Dewey?  This has worked for many years.  Why reinvent the wheel? The system is well-established.  Shouldn't I be helping my students use a system that they will find in other libraries? What ultimately pushed me to do this was the impact that I envisioned this would have on students. Students would be able to browse independently and discover more books in the genres they were interested in.  No longer would they need to wait for me to travel with them through the fiction shelves and pull handfuls of books off the shelf that were "funny" or "scary."  Our collection would be browse-able and student-friendly.  The inspiration I had done some relocating and re...

I made two changes to our library program and introduced these to 2nd-5th grade students on our first day of library. 1. Genre-fication of the fiction section In the past I found myself moving shelf to shelf with children pulling out the "funny" books or the "animal" books to show them their options. While I was more than happy to do this, I felt that I was not building capacity in students. I showed students how to locate books in the catalog, but if they only had a few minutes to locate a book and they weren't exactly sure what they wanted, our collection wasn't all that browseable. I had made an effort to put interesting books into bins and label them accordingly so certain series would be easily identifiable but my concern was for the students who wanted a book like something else they had read. Diary of a Wimpy Kid fans knew where the "Wimpy Kid shelf" was, but did they know how to find other books like them that they might enjo...