The old adage, Wear the old coat and buy the new book, was penned in the 19th century by American minister Austin Phelps, but it’s still practiced by almost every homeschool mama I know in the 21th century. Oh, we might replace coat with jeans, purse, or pajamas, but the practice is the same. A new pair of shoes for ourselves might make us feel guilty, but we enjoy blowing the budget on books for our family! 

If you home educate your children, it might feel like books multiply like proverbial rabbits. Each year we add more and more. We read them. We love them. We love owning them. We read them over and over again. But sometimes we struggle with tripping over them and finding the specific one we need, when we need it.  

Each July, our ‘Do It’ List includes a call to organize the bookshelves. That assignment might be a daunting task. As with most decluttering and organizational endeavors, you begin by making a bigger mess – you pull everything off the shelves!  You also need to pull together all the books that have been hiding under beds and sofas, in the bathroom, in the backseat of the car, etc. If some of your books need to live in a child’s room permanently, then move them there.  

The ones remaining will most likely be shelved in a family room or living room. Before just pushing them back on the shelves, give a little thought to how you will organize them. Initial thoughts might be to group them by age: 

• Picture books 
• Kid books 
• Mom and Dad books 
• School books 

That system might help but will still lead to struggle when your lesson plan calls for a biography about Lincoln and you know you have one, but just cannot seem to locate it. If you’ve ever gone to the library to check out a book you know you already have (or worse, bought a duplicate!), you know the need for a plan.  

When I faced this dilemma years ago, I actually considered investing in a software program to categorize our books, assign a Dewey decimal number, and generate a tag for the spine of each book.

Thankfully, sanity ruled as I realized the scope of such an endeavor! 

My goals were to: 

• Make it easy for the children to re-shelve books during “pick-up” time (we all know the challenge of staying organized after the work of getting organized) 
• Be able to put my hands on a book when I needed it 

I settled on an approach that worked well for our family.

First, I purchased round, colored stickers (like these from Avery).

Next step: organizing your books by topic. Here’s an example of our plan, but your categories will be adjusted to your stash of books: 

• Red: Christian 
• Orange: Art 
• Yellow: History 
  • Yellow with a letter*: Biography 
• Green: Geography 
• Blue: Science 

*The biography books, as a subcategory of history, received a yellow sticker. However, I also used a Sharpie to add the first letter of the last name of the subject. (A book on Abraham Lincoln received an L, a book on Florence Nightingale an N, and so on.) 

Textbooks were kept on a separate shelf. Picture books, which were not labeled, stayed on the lowest shelves. Small board books can be stashed in a basket on a lower shelf to make more efficient use of space.  

The beauty of this system was that even the youngest children (those not yet reading) could re-shelve books by color. And mom could also easily discern when a science book was incorrectly shelved with the art books … blue sticks out in a sea of orange. 

You may want to sort first, then assign your categories. If you have no art books, for example, you may assign orange to another category. 

A couple of additional considerations before adding stickers and re-shelving: 

1.  Consider purging any you really don’t need or won’t read again. Less really is more –yes, even when talking about books. 
2. Books can easily be sold on Amazon, passed along to another family, or donated to your local library or thrift store
   
3. Be sure to give the shelves a good dusting before beginning to re-shelve books
4. Explain the system to the children to ensure their help in maintaining it 
5. Keep extra stickers accessible so new books can be correctly color-coded immediately after you bring them home
   

Hopefully this system gives you some ideas for getting your bookshelves in order. July is the perfect time to do this, as you prepare for a new school year. We would love to hear about (or SEE) your results. Leave us a comment below or – better still—post a photo on our Facebook page!

Happy book organizing to you and yours! 

 

July 2019 'Do It' List

July 2019 BLANK 'Do It' List