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Cover of picture book The Library Dragon
book by Carmen Agra Deedy

When teaching your students the school rules at the beginning of the year (or reviewing them throughout the year), do you teach rules for going to and using the library?

Teaching basic procedures and rules to your students should include more than just going over your classroom rules. Especially if part of your routine is either going to the library as a whole group or allowing students to go individually during study time or class time.

When teaching my students my rules (or expectations as I call them), I always teach a lesson on going and using the library.

Here are my basic going-to-the-library-as-a-class expectations:

  • Walk silently and in a straight line to the library.
  • Sit in assigned seats at the library tables.
  • When in the stacks, make your book choice as an individual, not as a group.
  • Make your selection within eight minutes, then head to the circulation desk and check out your book.

  • Once you've checked out your independent reader, go back to your assigned seat and read silently until we are dismissed as a class.

  • No bathroom or locker passes once in the library.

  • No reading of magazines or resource materials.

  • Use the card catalog before you go to the library~in other words, know what you're getting before you go.

  • No talking, chewing gum, eating candy, drinking, or leaning back in your seat while in the library.
  • Treat library books like your friends. You wouldn't put a booger on a friend, would you?

I also include specific classroom rules for going to the library during class time:

  • You must be finished with all class assignments, and I'm not teaching (a.k.a. reading time).
  • Only two students at a time can have a library pass.
  • Walk quietly to the library.
  • You are allowed fifteen minutes max for your library pass.
  • Get one of the librarians to stamp your agenda after you have checked out your book and you are ready to leave the library.
  • Walk quietly back to class and enter the classroom discreetly.
  • Show me your book.
  • Sit down and read quietly.
  • You are allowed on library pass per week, which must be written in your agenda.
  • You may not get a library pass if we have been to the library as a whole class that week (unless you were absent).
  • A library pass includes a pass from any class period~not just English Language Arts.


Melissa Reese Etheridge

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