If you are a lover of children’s literature, chances are you have picked up various story collections over the years and they sit magnanimously on your shelf as proof of what an excellent literature connoisseur you are. And… that’s often all they do.  While it’s easy to keep a selection of picture books rotating through the home and reading a chapter book as a family is not usually a problem, very often these anthologies of tales get lost in the shuffle.

I’ve just now figured how to remedy this wrong in our home and I hope this gives you organization ideas too…

Like many others, I keep a monthly order of picture books, rotating in a basket in our home. This ensures that our great books get read throughout the year and keeps things seasonally relevant.  Before I had a sufficient number of books to do this, I kept just four seasonal baskets. You can use library books to fill in gaps of course. Well, I don’t know what took me so long to realize this, but why wasn’t I just putting our fairy tale compilations and other story books in with the monthly baskets?!  So now, that’s what I do… the The Blue Fairy Book belongs to October,  Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Stories for Children will be a March read and The Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies was enjoyed last month!  Rocket science.

I’m using this method also to rotate through all the lovely Peter Rabbit books. They used to sit all together in a row, nicely on the shelf… but for some reason not read often enough! So now I put about 2 titles in each month’s basket just to make sure we are giving Beatrix Potter her due justice.

Still trying to figure out the balance of non-fiction books and how to sort them. Currently they sit waiting to be pulled when a subject comes up in school that complements it. At least my poetry, saints, composers and artist books get read in our Morning Basket… but for all those wonderful titles like The Librarian Who Measured the Earth or the new Simple Machines, we just wait until they’re relevant… ?

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

-Phillip Pullman