Building a Classroom Library Abroad

Among the many activities and lessons I developed for my grade eights this year the most exciting was building a classroom library.  Since I am teaching in China, building a classroom library took a little more pre-planning and creativity to organize than if I had an English bookstore in my city. Prior to the winter holiday I met with my students’ parents and proposed my plan to build a class library.  With my parents’ support and financial contributes I was able to buy over 170 books while on holiday in Vancouver, Canada.  Getting the books back to China was a balancing act of weight distribution in my returning suite cases.  It all worked out however and I was able to make the books fit with out paying for extra weight!

The finished library was divided into three learning levels with a wide range of topics to fit the diverse levels and interests of the class. The library includes reading levels for early English language learners, intermediate and advanced to fluent readers.  The library consists of fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels and several reference books such as, dictionaries and thesauruses, which were purchased in China.  For the remaindered of the year I conducted silent reading time in class where I did mini lessons about effective reading and reading for thinking purposes.  I was very happy with the results of the library and look forward to using the books again next year with my students as they enter grade nine.