Read 180 Library Reveal

Happy Saturday!  My Saturday has been busy!  A semi-private Zumba class this morning, grocery store for fresh produce, cooking up ground turkey, the crockpot is full of apple chicken, and cooling on my counter are pear and walnut muffins.  The meat and muffins will be put in the freezer for lunches and dinners, because apparently I have to go back to work on Monday.  Three weeks until our next break, and hopefully I will have enough "good for me" nourishment stocked up in the freezer for the home stretch.

This post is long overdue.  I promised this post so long ago, and I couldn't quite figure out a way to legitamately fit it into one of the linky parties on the loop.  Today, regardless of the linky or lack of linky, I wanted to get back to the reason I started blogging.

The Read 180 Library

Read 180 is an intensive reading intervention program by Scholastic.  It involves a wheel of instruction that includes whole group lessons that then move into rotations of small group, independent reading, and computer time with a leveled software, and back to whole group for the wrap up.  If you are thinking that it is complicated, you are right, and I have an entire shelf of teacher manuals to explain it all to you.  It is a great program, but it is difficult to master all the components in the first year.  One of the toughest things was figuring out how to manage the independent reading rotation and the library that comes with it. 

After years of fighting with the blue plastic crates that came with the library, and desperately trying to keep it intact, I gave up.

I would nag and carry on about keeping the books in order, and in reality, you couldn't even read the titles on more than half the books once they were put in the crate.  The books kept slipping back behind the divider and it was impossible to keep them in any type of order.  So I cannibalized the crates and used magazine holders from Ikea.

This is one of my earlier pictures.  The audio books required two of the magazine holders (forever attached together with a generous application of packing tape along the bottom and back).  The plastic shoeboxes are holding the System 44 books (phonics) and some Level 1 books.  Recognize the blue plastic being used as dividers?  Yep, those are parts of the original crates.

Now, they all have labels.  Each book has an adorable label from Alison Rose's Surfboards and Numbers.    The shoe boxes slide off the shelf for easy perusing, and the dividers and labels make checking to see if they are in order a breeze.

 

Some of the boxes have dividers too.  The books at the first two levels are thin, and the boxes can hold more than one set. 

It makes it so much easier for the kids to find their books and to keep them in order.  The last group doing Independent Reading is responsible for straightening up the shelves, and it takes them just a few minutes.  This picture was taken last Friday, right after they went to lunch - this is what my shelves really look like.  These shelves hold the audio books, System 44 books, and some Level 1 books for Read 180.

On the other side of the table are two more bookcases.  The top of both bookcases holds Read 180 Levels 3 and 4 books, while the shoeboxes hold Level 2 books.  The bottom two shelves on this bookcase, and all the shelves on the bookcase perpendicular to it hold the fiction books.  They are alphabetically by author - in shoeboxes.  Up in front, flanking the Smartboard are two more bookcases that hold non-fiction.

Last spring, I got rid of the file folders full of QuickWrites and Graphic Organizers and placed them all by Lexile in binders.

I cut the posters apart and placed them in fours inside sheet protectors.  The QuickWrites and Graphic Organizers for each book are behind the synopsis pages, in the same order. 

It was pretty scary to step away from the crates and posters, but this has worked so much better!  No more loitering around the book poster, and endlessly looking for QuickWrites!  Keeping track of the QuickWrites and Graphic Organizers is now my student assistant's job.  She uses this list and once a week, she goes through the binders and checks to see what we are running low on.

The complete list is available at my Teachers Pay Teachers store for free!  Feel free to edit and revise to make it fit your Read 180 library! 

Have a great weekend!  Don't forget to make your wishlist (and check it twice) for the BIG SALE on Monday and Tuesday!