Organizing for our Animal Inquiry

As we were looking for books on specific animals, we realized that we needed to reorganize our classroom library so that we could find our books more easily.
Our first task was to gather all of our animal books from all of the classroom book baskets.  We collaborated to find any and all nonfiction animal books in our classroom library.

Our pile got bigger...

 ...and bigger...

...and bigger!

There were so many good books that sometimes we *had* to stop and explore!

Next, we discussed how to sort our library so we could easily find the books we need.  There were a lot of great ideas!  We took a vote:

It was close, but we decided to sort our animal books by first letter.
After we made the big decision, it was back to the pile to start sorting them out!  We had letters placed around the room and we each took piles of books to organize.  It was amazing how quickly it went when we all worked together!

We were very busy!

Finally, we needed to identify our book baskets.  We worked on making labels for each animal basket.

Here are the finished labels.

We had a lot of books that had lots of different animals inside, so we came up with a few ways to solve our problem...habitat baskets of mixed animals, and books of generic mixed animals.

For days after we were marveling at how easy it was to find the animal we wanted to research!