Color Coded Library!

I've been asked about sharing how I organize our personal library. So, here's my little post on how I do this. I hope it encourages you and that you can tweak it as you see fit for your family. 

As you know, we homeschool and that means that through the years we have accumulated several books. I found it necessary to have our books organized in some visual way to help keep things simple.

I keep all of our children's books (these are not chapter books) on a lower shelf near the sofa. This way they are all ready for story time in a comfy place. I haven't bothered to color code these (but maybe you would like to in your personal library).

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Children's book shelf.

Each school year I have a basket for our core curriculum we are using. I keep that near the sofa because that's where I read aloud to our children. Then they'll either do their notebook work while sitting on the sofa and using lap desks, at the coffee table, or they'll use the dining table or school table in the other room (it just depends on the room we're in at the time). At the end of the school year, I just add those books to the genre categories. This way I have my basket available for the next school year's curriculum.

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My Curriculum Basket

While I categorize our books by genre, I haven't bothered with branching books by genre into categories by age. I mainly care that books by genre can be found easily and put back easily in one location (if you know what I mean). Given that, we do have the books in a timeline order.


I color code the genres with inventory dots. For biographies I use dots that are half blue and half black (I used my sharpie on the blue dots). And for autobiographies I just use a half green and half black dot.

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Red dots identify History books.

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Half yellow and black dots identify fiction books:

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Green dots identify books with a focus on Geography and blue dots identify science related books:

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 Special nature books are kept in a basket with some favorite findings from nature walks:

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Books I have not bothered to use dots for:

Math books- these are all kept on one shelf (along with containers for math manipulatives).

Language books- these are all grouped together on one shelf.

Reference books- these are all on a shelf above my workspace and for my use.

On My To Do List:

I'm going to be using either yellow or orange inventory dots to identify our poetry books. 

Important:

I found that I need to go over the dots with packaging tape because the dots don't stay put without it.

And that's pretty much it in a nutshell. Has this post been helpful to you? If so, please leave a comment. Or share about some ways you have organized your personal homeschool library. :)

Blessings!

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