The Most Popular Books In My Middle School Classroom Library This Year

My classroom library is the heart of my classroom. My school doesn’t have a school library so the books in my classroom are it for my sixth grade students as far as immediately accessible books. We do independent reading daily in my classroom so I want there to be plenty of books for them to access.

Last year I started taking a closer look at the top checkouts in my classroom library through a report I exported from Booksource  (the library management system I use; it’s free!). While I always have a general sense of what is popular and what hasn’t left the shelf, I liked being able to look at the actual data to make decisions about what books to add or weed from my classroom library.

Read on for the top book checkouts by genre (plus graphic novels) from my classroom library this past school year.

5 Things I Tried This School Year

At the end of the school year, before it starts to run into all the previous years, I like to take a moment to reflect on the new things I tried this year, what worked and what didn't. This will be my fourth year of reflecting this way and it has been so helpful to look back at my past posts to see how much I have grown as an educator and to see which practices I want to continue, which I want to try again differently, and which I want to let go of because they no longer serve me. 

Screen Free Travel Activities That Are Kid & Teacher Mom Approved

Between time on the plane, time in the car and time spent waiting at restaurants, kids need things to do on trips. We are generally a screen free family, so you won't find us bringing tablets with us (one of our flights did have screens built into the seats and we did let our girls watch movies because that is something we do at home). I like to bring a variety of tried and true activities that I know will be a hit as well as some new activities to change things up.