Labels and Other Things

Hi faithful followers! I feel so bad that I've been a blogger bum the past couple months (or a little longer than that!). School always seems to overwhelm me around March and I don't seem to get to take a breathe until we get out in May. Sound familiar? Then a week after school got out I left for a five week trip to Africa...which was AMAZING!

So anyways now I'm back, I've started to look through all my comments. I'm so thrilled so many of you are wanting to use my book bin labels in your classroom. I've gotten a lot of request for templates and other things. So I'm going to try and address all your questions here!

1) What kind of labels did you use? I didn't design the book bins to be used on sticky labels. I just printed mine on cardstock and then laminated them. I used masking tape to attach them to my plastic book bins. You could also do the hole punch and binder ring if you have one of those holey book bins.

2) Can you send me your template or the orignial document? Sorry no can do for two reasons! One I created the labels using Apple Pages (a program most people don't have). Two the graphics are created by Thistle Girl, and as part of my reselling license I can only offer projects in a non-editable format (like pdf files!).

3) The files keep showing up as a picture file! This shouldn't be happening but I'll post another link. It should open as a pdf file. Please note that you will not be able to edit any of the documents (see above question for the reason why!).  Make sure once you open them in googleDocs go to file (in the top left hand corner) and download. This should download the file to pdf to be printed!! Not sure why it's showing all those extra pages! You may want to select page by page of the labels you need so you don't waste paper. =)

Download Labels Here!

Hope that helps everyone with your beginning of the year preparations! Hopefully I'll be able to post more often this year but I'm not counting on it as I'm starting grad school in a few weeks!

Jessie

Freebie: Book Bin Labels

 A little background: My first year teaching I taught 2nd grade and basically had my entire classroom lined with book bins. I loved this system, and I loved the fact that my kids had access to so many good books. However when I moved to kindergarten there was just so much other stuff filling my space that I just didn't quite know how to handle my massive collection of books. I also wasn't sure about trusting five year olds to handle putting books back in their proper places. So sadly for the first two years I taught kindergarten many of my books stayed on my teacher book shelf and only came out for read alouds.

So last summer I decided to bring my books back into the spotlight and give them the opportunity for much needed love they so badly deserved. I wanted a easy way for my students to access the books but also for them to keep them organized. I ended up sorting the books by categories and genres. I ended up with four main categories (fiction, non-fiction, favorite authors, favorite friends/characters) which were then divided into lots of other sub-categories.  Each of the big categories was assigned a bin color: red for non-fiction, blue for favorite friends (like Clifford, Spot, Curious George, etc), yellow for favorite authors, and blue for fiction. I labeled each box with a picture label and then each book within the box a small sticker. It was a lot of work but sooooo worth it! The kids did amazing at keeping the books in their designated bins (we called it the book's home).  Here's some pics from my classroom library (sorry if there's some repeats from my tour post!)

Update: I combined all the label documents into a single document and uploaded it to google documents. For some reason during the merging process an extra blank page was inserted between every page (boo!)...it was too frustrating to try and remove it so I just left it for my own sanity! Sorry! Hope you enjoy these labels and can put them to use in your own libraries!
Book Bin Labels in Google Docs

These are our favorite friends bins. They house our Clifford, Spot, Arthur, Franklin, Berenstein Bears, etc. collections.

These are the only bins that do not have sticker labels on the books or bins because the kids were able to match the characters really easier with their correct bins.

Our fiction section. These books are historical fiction, silly stories, animal characters, ABC books, etc.

The stickers on the upper right of the bin label are on each of the books in these bins. The kids loved matching the stickers to find the home of each book. I just used small reward stickers from the teacher supply store that I had lying around.

Non-Fiction Section: By far the most popular in my class. =)

Where ripped books go.

Another look at the non-fiction bins. See the sticker labels?

Favorite Authors Bins: Eric Carle, Dr. Seuss, Lois Ehlert, Jan Brett, Tedd Arnold....all live here.

So as a small token of thanks for all the wonderful ideas and printables I've "borrowed" from all the amazing teacher blogs out there I wanted to offer up my first (hopefully of many) printable to blog readers. I would love to hear your comments (or even better follow me!).  Not sure how these will post as pictures- let me know if you have trouble opening them!

Happy Organizing!
Jessie

PLEASE NOTE THE PICTURES BELOW ARE NOT THE ACTUAL DOCUMENTS!! IF YOU CLICK ON THEM THEY WILL OPEN AS A PICTURE FILE! CLICK ON THE LINK ABOVE TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF FILES!!