So you went and watched that trendy Netflix show called “The Home Edit,” and you think to yourself, I could organize my child’s books by color!  What a great idea! People…  Have we not learned yet folks?  Children destroy all things good! 

You go to your child’s room, rearrange all 100 books by color and size, then show your perfectly sweet toddler.  In your eyes, you think “how aesthetically pleasing.”  In your child’s eyes, they think “another way to make mom’s life hell today.”

Now, if you read my previous post you may have learned not to leave your child alone when cleaning.  So you only turn around for one minute to change the baby into jammies and when you turn around the toddler is pulling the books off handful by handful.  There goes all your hard work out the window. 

Honestly, it is way easier to put books back quickly by color than by genre or any other grouping.  I even have thought about organizing my classroom books this way. 

 Then students don’t have to remember where they got a book from.  They can just see that their red book goes back with the other red books.

 I used to organize my classroom books by genre and levels and book club books, just a modge podge of categories, and I somehow expected my students to place them back correctly but they always got misplaced.  Did you know that students can read a few levels above their reading level when it is something they are interested in? 

 This is because they have already been exposed to the vocabulary making it easier for them to recognize the text.

If we always tell students to just look at books that are at their level, they won’t be pushed to explore more challenging texts.  We can still teach students how to distinguish if a book is at their level, it is just that each student’s levels will be different.  

Head to my products page to find a list of more ways to organize books, including what I use at home!