Commit to the Lord whatever you do,
and your plans will succeed.
Proverbs 16:3
July is quickly approaching, so it’s time to print our ‘Do It’ list for the new month and be ready to check off those boxes!
We hope you are experiencing the peace and joy that come with living in a clutter-free, clean and tidy home. Remember: perfection is not possible. Our goal is to manage our homes and lives well so we are freed up to serve God and love on others.
If you are just joining us – or have been with us a while but feel you need a refresher – check out all the posts in our ‘Do It’ series to review the explanation of daily, weekly and monthly tasks (and print previous ‘Do It’ lists).
The daily and weekly lists remain constant – with occasional tweaks as seasons change or we refine methods – but each time we publish a new list, it will include at least one monthly task that needs to be done only once or twice per year.
Traditionally, we’ve used each month’s ‘Do It’ blog post to focus on different items on the daily, weekly, or monthly list. We hope this provides both explanation and encouragement to spur you on.
The July unique monthly task is: organize the bookshelves.
As home educators, we love our books. They seem to multiply like rabbits. Homeschoolers everywhere seem to heartily embrace the old adage, “Wear the old coat and buy the new book!” (and we don’t even mind if it’s not new – we are happy as pigs in mud at a used book sale). My guess is that you can approximate the number of years a mom has been homeschooling by the number of bookshelves in her home!
We treasure our books. We need our books. We read them, refer to them, and even sometimes sleep with them. But how can we find them when we need them?
Is there anything more frustrating than looking for a specific book – a title you know you have! – and being unable to find it?
I faced this dilemma repeatedly when we were in the throes of homeschooling our four. I even considered purchasing a library software program to catalog our books … but that option was discarded because of the massive labor required to implement it.
Instead, I developed my own system. Utilizing round dot stickers (like these) with permanent adhesive, I assigned a color to each genre of books. Here’s my system:
|
Sticker Color |
Book Genre |
|
Red |
Christian |
|
Orange |
Art |
|
Yellow |
History |
|
Yellow |
Biography |
|
Green |
Geography |
|
Blue |
Science |
Fiction books did not get stickers, but they were grouped by age-level and (somewhat) by author. Picture books were on lower shelves, chapter books on upper.
It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was efficient and made it fairly easy to put books back in their places. Even a child who cannot read yet can re-shelve books by color. In our pre-dot days, our all-hands-on-deck house tidying drills always seemed to end with a jumbled mess on the bookshelves (and a very frustrated mama exclaiming a few days later, “I know we have a biography of Monet! Where is it?”).
Depending on how many books and bookshelves you have, this might be a one-hour job, an afternoon job or a two-day job.
Begin by pulling all your books off the shelves and sorting into the categories above. Then evaluate each category. As yourself questions like:
- “Do we need 14 Christmas craft books?”
- “Are eight biographies of George Washington necessary?”
- “Have we outgrown My First Book of the Body?”
It’s a hard thing to do, but try to purge out books that are no longer needed and might bless someone else.
Now it’s time to affix the labels. Just peel them off and wrap around the spine near the bottom (in the same place you’d find Dewey Decimal labels at the library). Only yellow stickers for biographies get a letter; use a permanent black marker and add the first letter of the subject’s last name to the label before affixing it to the book. A biography of Helen Keller will have a K, David Livingston an L, and so forth.
After adding all the stickers, assign shelves for each genre of books. Try not to shove them in so tightly that can’t be easily removed. It’s much better to spill over to a second shelf (and leave both with some open space) than to cram too many titles onto one. Your children should not have to wrestle a book from its home … and you also need to leave room for your next used book sale haul!
We hope you have fun with this project and will soon enjoy the blessing of having your books tidy and accessible! July is the perfect time to make it happen – it’s hot outside, and this task helps get the inside ready for the new school year.
Would you like to inspire others with your finished project? Please post of a pic of your achievement on our Facebook page. We also invite you to leave a comment below to share feedback, tips, or your own method for organizing books.
Here’s to the love of books!
There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world.
Love of books is the best of all.
–Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Ready to download your July ‘Do It’ List?
Click below to get your copy today!
