I bit my lip. It's the second day of school and I still don't have my library set up--so the kids don't have books yet. A half dozen boxes of books sit in front of my library shelves. Why? I can't decide how to organize them. Do I organize them by genre? By reading level? By shape?
When Mike asked if they could read today, I had to reconsider my plans to organize. What was I waiting for? In my desire to have the perfect start to the school year, I failed to open the most important part--our library.
"Hey, kids," I said, "do you want to sort the books?"
Cheers all around. "Great--how do you want to sort them?" I asked. "By reading level or by genre?" I jumped on the opportunity to teach the word genre and gave them some of the categories. Carla raised her hand. "I think we should sort them by level. If we do it by genre, it would take a long time for us to figure out what kind of books they are. And we want to read now!"
It's hard to argue with that. I handed armfuls of books to all the kids, and they brought them to the tables for the sorting. Have you ever been to smorgasbord? That's how our classroom looked. Kids were feasting on a variety of books--scary stories, fantasies, biographies, mysteries. There was something for everybody.
Eventually every student had picked a book to read, and they even sorted most of the books into bins. All my kids walked home today with a book in hand, and that's the way it should be the first week of school.
I overcame my compulsive desire for order. It's time to trust chaos. And sometimes when you trust chaos, you end up with a book in your pocket and a story in your heart.
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