This is part of my series on Building A Chinese Library.
At this point, I’ve organized Chinese library for about 5-6 people; the method is the same even if the books are different.
So I guess this post is more of a “hey, look at these books I ogled while I organized!” post. I wrote 3 other posts about how I organized for Fleur, Dots, and Mandarin Mama awhile back.
Lavender‘s has about 500 books in her Chinese library. She is a super good example that you don’t need a big Chinese library to accomplish your Chinese goals.
The unique challenge for her library is she has a huge Ikea closet type space that is deep enough for 2 rows of books. But the total available shelf space was small.
After this many times, I feel like my process is very much like a Marie Kondo process. Except of course, every book gives me joy and I try to keep 99% of it.
A quick step by step of what I did.
- Dump every book on the floor, organized by fiction, non-fiction, picture books, curriculum, and books we don’t want.
- Talk to Lavender about her needs. What books are her children reading now? What books does she want to keep out of reach?
- Put the books back on the shelf!
The whole process took me about 5-6 hours……Probably because I was busy chatting with her the whole time, and also because I organized her English collection as well.
I’m so sad I didn’t take a before pic. The books were haphazardly piled one on top of another in this huge closet. Thankfully she only has a small collection.
Isn’t it purtyful?
In case you’re wondering what exactly is in her collection, let me go through them from bottom to top.
Bottom level are picture books for her younger child.
The drawers have supplies and stuff.
Third shelf from bottom are beginner bridging books like Elephant and Piggie, Lulu and Lala, Reading 123, Sagebooks, and some zhuyin books. The Reading 123 books are in the back because her older child has outgrown them. The Sagebooks and zhuyin are for the younger child when he’s done with the picture books and ready to learn to read.
Next up in the back are higher level bridging books like Dahl, 故事奇想樹, mystery books. These are all books her child has outgrown.
In front of these are books in her current level. Lots of non-zhuyin books from Hong Kong, and Eastern Publishing’s World Literature set.
Lastly, on top, are all the non-fictions. The non-fictions are organized by series because she doesn’t have a big enough collection.
I’m going to profile Lavender again in a separate post now that her daughter is in upper elementary. As you can see from her Chinese library collection, she was able to get her daughter to a very good Chinese level, even without a lot of books.
Voila!
Is there anything else to say? The hard part about organizing is dumping and sorting the books on the floor. And flipping through books to figure out their level. That always takes the longest time.
The other issue that stumped me this time is the sheer amount of non-zhuyin books in the lower elementary level. These books are from Hong Kong and hence no zhuyin so early. After talking it over with Lavender and figuring out her child’s reading progression, we decided to put it before the upper elementary books, as she introduced non-zhuyin reading right before those books.
In a way, this is why every library organization is different and why I love the challenge of organizing other people’s library. The needs of the parent and the child are different with each household. It always makes me so very happy to find a solution that meets their needs.
