Picture Book Genre

 Picture Book Genre

UPDATE:  I have also sorted the Reader section for students into the same groups.  I used the same stickers but added the letter R to identify the section to shelve in.

Many libraries have added Genres to their fiction collections and there are tons of resources online to help you complete this task.  There are however not many resources online for adding Genre to the Picture Book section of the library.  I started my journey at https://obxlibrarian.weebly.com/blog/easy-picture-book-genrefication  I was sad to see students just wandering around the picture book section when it was sorted by author only and spine out all the time.  Once I started to switch over to Genre topics for picture books I saw a change in the students when looking for books.  They took the time to flip through the front facing books to see what was in that section.  It was amazing!

1. The first step is to go through your picture books and pull out board books and step into reading type readers.  They make it difficult to shelve books because their size is so different from most picture books.  I created their own sections for these books.

2. You will need to select the topics (genre) that will work best with your collection and your students.  Here is a list of the topics I went with.

1.  ABC’s

2. Adventures

3. Animals (wild/zoo)

4. Author

5. Bears

6. Bugs

7. Career

8. 123’s

9. Dragons & Dinos

10. Farm

11. Friends and family

12. USA/Government

13. Pet Stories

14. Princess/Prince

15. Scary

16. School/Books

17. Sea life

18. Silly Stories

19. Sports

20. Holiday

21. Superhero

22. Trucks & Equipment

23. Video Games

The highlighted topics can be large sections.  I am looking into breaking them down into smaller sections.

Author sticker means to shelve by the author’s name.

3. I created stickers with the above labels on them along with clipart to match. I printed these on blank spine labels.  I placed the stickers on the top right corner of the book cover.  Choose what works best for you.

4. Now the work comes in.  Sort the picture books into piles based on the topics.  Then place the stickers on them.

5. How will you shelve the books now that they have stickers on them?

1. Spine out?  I do this for the large sections

2. Bins on the shelf.  I do this with small topics.  I prefer front facing books as much as possible

3. Larger bins on the floor to highlight a section/topic of the collection.

6. Holiday books have a spine label and shelved out of the way but still accessible to students.

NOTE:  I do end up with some overfull bins but that is only at the start and end of the year.  All other times the bins are half empty.

The following are examples of the genre stickers I created using clipart.  I am not claiming this artwork as my own.  Please use your own artwork or clipart.