Hi! In this new post I am going to talk about an activity we have been doing during this week. The activity is called “Creating your classroom library”. At the first moment we thought that it was a wonderful idea to have an English library inside your room, what it´s true, but it not as easy as seems. You, as teacher, can have lot of ideas to create this space but you need some help to carry out the whole project.
When my group and I were working on it, the first thing we did was to think about the space that we wanted to dedicate to the library in our class. We decided to locate it in a corner, in order to let the children relax in this part of the class while they read. We tried to separate it physically, with some stairs and cupboards. In this step we realized that we need to take into account the amount of money we have and how much each thing cost. But we don´t stop and think about the budget yet.
Then, we were thinking about the activities we will going to develop to make the classroom library an interesting place and to make sure ourselves that this space was going to be used for our students. We found and create lot of interesting activities like Top Reader, The Innocent Hand, Create your bookmark and much more, but I´m not going to develop each activity here, to know more about them you have to wait until the next Tuesday.
Well, after create the activities we started to think more seriously in the budget. We tried to do it as real as we could. And, being honest, in this moment in our country anybody can spend big amounts of money in anything. Taking into account this disadvantage, we tried to carry out the project with a very small budget. We decided to do a Readers Fair. In this fair, we collect founds to buy new books. Then with the school budget and the money collected we were looking for cheap furniture to complete our library in an economic Swedish shop. We bought some cupboards, some comfortable chairs and a carpet.
Et… voilà here we have our classroom library finished. 
I must say that I enjoy doing this project because it is an imaginary project but I think that in the future, when we had to do it really, is going to be a really difficult task. We are going to found lot of impediments that we will have to know how to solve it. For the moment we have an idea about how useful and how difficult is it.
Hello Yessica, I´m Jaime and after reading your post I have to say that I totally agree with your point of view and how you have shown the different stages of creating a classroom library.
One of the most important aspects that must be taking into account when a project of this dimension is being carried out is the economical one. As you said during your post, depending of the economic situation of the families whose children are studying at the school the budget for the library could be higher or lower, nevertheless it is also true that families would prefer to spend less money if it’s possible; For this reason I want to propose you some ideas that we find useful and affordable. The first idea that can be done is to ask students to create their own books, so that finally their books could form part of the library. Another interesting idea would be that each child could take a book from their houses and share it with the class during the year and by the time the course ends they would have their books back and the budget will be reduced.
I hope you liked my ideas and also that you and all of us could build our classroom library in the future.
Hi Yéssica ! I wanted to write you because I was doing this project with you. This project it was a great experience because we had the opportunity to create a library for our future class. I think we created this library as realistic as possible, we have been founding real budget and real prices for buy all materials as we need and also we found some solution to save budget and get materials on our own for example with a fair because nowadays save money it´s a very important point.
After the presentations, I discovered many activities and possibilities to create and carry out our libraries because all works was very good. Also with these presentations and some comments that our classmates said, we can improve our project.
In conclusion, this activity have been interesting, productive and useful for us because a English library in class is an important space because we have to encourage and motivate children to read and nowadays read english books is more important so definitely I encourage you to carry out this fantastic project and create your Englishlibraries with activities that motivate children to read.