I had to share this idea for organising your childrens books – or any books for that matter!
Bookcases can be very difficult to sort, as there are books of all different shapes, sizes, colours, genres etc…. – and none more so than childrens bookcases.
I don’t know many children who don’t like reading, or being read to – so there are bound to be lots of books in homes around the world! – the trick is to keep them tidy and organised – as much as possible anyway!
So – I have tackled my daughters bookcase to show you an example of the best idea I know for getting books sorted, and looking good at the same time!
My daughters bookcase is lovely – bought a few years back in a furniture sale at Laura Ashley – and she loves the fact that it looks like a dolls house (another project for us one day when her books move into a different space is to actually make this into a dolls house – I can’t wait!)
I chose this for her for a few reasons:-
- All the shelves are at a low level – making it easy to use
- The shelves are split into two sections – so you don’t have to heave loads of books up if they fall over
- It looked pretty!
The problem was that it still wasn’t being kept very tidy, and my daughter couldn’t find the books she wanted easily. The other issue was that there were lots of books that were too young for her now that she really didn’t want to part with, as they held special memories for her.
Heres what it looked like before we started organising:-
Not too bad – but the books were starting to overflow a little (thanks to some lovely Christmas presents!).
So I set myself the challenge of organising the books in such a way that they were appealing and easy to use, fun to look at, and generally my daughter and myself would be happy with it.
How we sorted the books
We tackled it together, and started by decluttering the bookcase.
We took out all the books, and decided which ones to keep, which to give to charity or friends/family, and which ones were past help and needed throwing away.
I let her make the decisions, as these were her books, and she felt in control of things which was really important.
It didn’t take more than 10 minutes to do this – and we ended up with a few piles around the room as a result.
Next we quickly cleaned the shelves (take the opportunity while its empty!) – and started to think how to put things back.
And thats when we came up with a great idea that really works well – and she is over the moon!
My idea for childrens books is to colour code them.
Children work well with colour – its very visual, and therefore they are drawn to anything colourful and fun looking. They are also more in tune with what a book looks like than reading its title when they are looking for it – so its also a very intuitive way of “filing” them for easy access too.
We started to sort the books according to the colour of their spines, and then put them all back into the bookcase in a rainbow like style.
I’m sure you’ll agree that this is a much nicer way of sorting out books, and it should be a little easier for my daughter to keep organised now as she loves the colours so much and wants to keep it like that.
TIP – This also works well in rooms that the look of the books is more important than the genre (as you will be mixing up the books for colour rather than category for example) – I use this successfully for my recipe books, any shelves of books around the house, and those in my home office