Books,  Family,  Kids,  Life Simplified,  Loosening My Grip,  Organization,  Organized Chaos,  Raising Multiples

Organized Chaos: Kid’s Bookshelves

P1350842c

 Kids bookshelf

Our family loves books!  It has always been something we have done together.  When the girls were little we would read to them everyday.  Now we read more chapter books, library books, and special books together as a family.  We do a rotation on who gets to pick out the next chapter book we will read as a family.  Sometimes if Jake is traveling he may miss a chapter or two otherwise we usually do this activity together.

When the girls were little we barely had any kids books.  We started collecting them, the kids got some as gifts, and they have also bought some with their spending money.  Over the years these books have accumulated.  For one of their gifts a couple years ago Jake made the girls a bookshelf for their room.  They LOVE it!  For the most part they do keep it pretty neat, but every once in awhile it needs a little cleaning and organizing.

As you can see from the picture above they have books piled on top of the books on the shelf, books leaning all directions, random items that are not books on the bookshelf, and various books out of place.  Since they keep it in decent order it doesn’t take long to freshen up the book shelf, put books away, dust, and we had it looking better in no time.

We have their books arranged in specific order.  On the top are the kids classics and chapter book series.  The 2nd shelf down we have more chapter books or series.  On the 3rd shelf from the top we have the Golden Classics and soft cover books.  The 4th shelf from the top contains all the kids reference and educational books.  On the 5th shelf from the top we have hard cover books.  The very bottom shelf contains more hard cover books, including some series.

P1350848c

 Bookshelf is all dusted and organized!

The next big bookshelf project I need to do is to go through all the younger kids books.  Our kids have outgrown a lot of the smaller  books so I need to decide which ones to keep, donate, sell, etc….  I have slowly been starting to do this by giving some of the younger kid books to kids who I know enjoy those types of books.  I love looking into the kids rooms and seeing them reading books either on their own or together.  It makes my heart happy.  The learning to read fluently has been a journey for our family.  Part of my hesitation in going through and getting rid of some of their smaller books means I have to admit my little babies are growing up and to a Momma’s heart it kind of makes me sad.  Not sure if I will ever be truly ready, but I will eventually go through the books and eliminate some more kids ones so that it will make more room for their more advanced reading books, just not today…