An organized classroom library!

Well, it took forever....but my classroom library will finally be more organized for this school year!

I brought all my books home and then took over the living room for a couple of days to organize them.  I prefer this to being cooped up in my classroom forever!  I got these great baskets at my local Dollar Tree. As I worked I inputted everything into an Excel document so I finally have an inventory of my books.  This will be really helpful when choosing read-alouds or books for writing/reading strategy lessons.

Additionally, I leveled the books using two websites.  Scholastic has the Book wizard website and lexile.com has their database as well.  If I wasn't sure how a lexile level translated to a Fountas & Pinnell, I used this chart.

Finally, I created labels for my different baskets.  They turned out really cute!  They may or may not match another Spanish immersion teacher's classroom, they are very specific to what books I have built up over the years (and sometimes you're limited in what you can get in Spanish!)

A couple things I realized from doing this:

1) I have way more fiction than non-fiction.  This is bad.  I was just reading about the "Nonfiction Gap" on Scholastic's website--a classroom library should be 40%-60% nonfiction, whereas mine is definitely fiction based
2)  My non-fiction books are also a little on the high side level-wise.  Many of them are level M, which is end of 2nd grade.  Not to mention I teach immersion, so the kids read at a little lower level than they would in English.
Therefore...my mission this year is to acquire Spanish language non-fiction books around level J...like this great set from Time for Kids perhaps!  Maybe my school will have some funds, or I can convince my new group of parents this year!