Organizing for Our Animal Inquiry

Our classroom library is a big consideration as we prepare for the serious research we do during our animal inquiry.  Right now we have about eight tubs of "animals and habitats" books, plus various animal books mixed in with our "just right" leveled book baskets.
We started to do our research by creating "Did You Know?" papers to share the cool facts that we found.

We realized that we were wasting our time trying to find specific animal books that we wanted because there were so many animals and habitats baskets in our classroom library!  In order to easily find the books we need without wasting time searching, we needed to reorganize our classroom library.
To get ready, we had to find all the animal books!  We had quite a big pile as we pulled as many animal books as we could find!

Our pile got bigger...

...and bigger...

 ...and bigger!

 

 Wow!  We have a lot of animal books in our classroom!

As a group, we talked about ways we could organize our books.  We were trying to decide between by habitat, by classification, by skin, or by first letter.

We stood up and tried to persuade people to group them the way we wanted them grouped.  

After a class vote, we decided to sort them based on habitat--then if we wanted to find a book on giraffes, we would look in the 'grasslands' basket.  

Time to organize! Next, we passed our books out around the room based on habitat. 

We realized that when we collaborated, the immense job got done so much more quickly!

Then, we had to label each basket. We created labels for the book baskets.

Such hard workers!