Book Organizing

Last week I wrote about organizing our school area.  Well that same organizing urge also made me want to attack our books.  

I started with four boxes of books.  I have been collecting books for Xander since before he was born.  I have had some great luck at garage sales and consignment shops and gotten some great deals.  Anyway, I kept most of them packed from when we moved, except books on one shelf in the living room and another couple of shelves in our room.

As you can see, I had done a half hearted attempt at organizing in one of the boxes (mostly into holidays), but it was far from being functional.

So I started sorting....

and sorting.  I finally got them into what I considered workable categories.  Some categories that didn't have enough books had to share a bin.  I only ended up with two bins labeled "stories" for books that didn't really fit well anywhere else.

Each category got a box (these from IKEA, I already need more).  I printed some cute little labels and am very happy with the result!  The middle shelf has a lot of our leveled readers, our phonics readers, our Preschool Prep readers, and our Your Baby Can books.

In order to help me remember which of our books we have already read for our book challenge, I took all of the books we have read out and put them back in the big boxes.  What is left ion the shelf are the books we have not read.  I decided that as we complete a category, I will put a page marker on the box and put the books we have already read back in.  Maybe not the most efficient way to do it, but it will work for this year.