7 Tips For Librarians’ Best Back To School Season

notebook paper with paper clips and blog post title

The back to school season can be busy and stressful, especially when you’re not only setting up your school library classroom but also supporting every teacher and administrator on campus. Everyone in the building seems to be excited and stressed out at the same time. The best we can do is to have our own tasks streamlined and in order so that we can respond to the unexpected challenges that crop up as we welcome students to a brand new school year.

Create Your Library Cards

I wrote this blog post about how my school library cards help me every single day, all year long. I would not go back to school without them!

school library card for back to school

I copy them on bright cardstock and add library bar codes before school starts. Students write their first names on their cards on their first library visit and use them for check out, for shelf markers, and for book return rewards all year long. They will make your school library run so much more efficiently!

You can check out these essential school library cards in my TPT shop.

Choose Your Read Alouds for the First Week Back to School

book covers for back to school with The Book that Jake Borrowed and Where are My Books?

I wrote this blog post about my favorite back to school picture book read-alouds. The blog post also includes free, printable activity pages for each book! Choose those engaging picture books about reading and book care and check them out to yourself so that you can preview them and become familiar with them before that first class arrives.

Plan Your Book Care Lessons for the Littles

library book wrapped in baby blanket

For PreK-first grade, book care lessons are so important during back to school season. I recorded this video, sharing my thoughts about how teaching book care thoroughly in the younger grades pays dividends in the upper grades. I use the Book Baby lesson, and it has been so helpful in helping students to understand how to take care of our school library books!

Plan Your Library Orientation for the Big Kids

library orientation editable quiz game product cover

We need to communicate our rules and expectations at back to school time, but repeating the same information over and over gets boring for everyone, and it doesn’t help us really connect with our students. I created a digital library orientation game that you can edit and then play with your classes, to communicate the rules in a much more engaging way. Sound effects and animations hold student attention way more than a teacher voice does!

I also make it a priority to read a fun picture book with all classes, to set the expectation that we are going to spend the whole school year reading together, and we’re going to have a great time doing that.

Build Your Library Schedule

When you go back to school, setting up your daily schedule is an important task. If you’re on a fixed schedule and part of a rotation, you may have no choice in your daily schedule. If you are on a flexible or semi-flexible schedule, I recommend that you first block out a lunch and conference period every day, just like classroom teachers.

You may choose to eat lunch with other members of the “specials” team (or whatever the PE, art, and music teachers are called at your school) or with a grade level classroom teacher team. I recommend choosing to have your conference time at the same time that the “specials” team has their conference time. That way, you are free to meet up with teaching teams during their conference times, when they are planning lessons that you might be able to collaborate on.

Block out other times when you will not be available. For example, I blocked out morning announcement times (because yes, teachers would try to schedule library times during the morning announcements I was in charge of) and small group teaching times (mandated across campus).

school library schedule chart

I planned my schedule by taking a printed chart on a clipboard and a pencil from room to room as teachers were setting up their classroom. That gave me an opportunity to meet face to face, reconnecting with teachers from the prior year and meeting new teachers. I asked them what day and time they preferred for their weekly library visits, and I pencilled them into a time slot. Here’s a link to the library schedule template on Google Docs that I used.

Once I had the schedule completed, and we had followed the schedule for a few weeks, and any new teachers and classrooms were added, I copied it 36 times and placed it in a 3-ring binder at our circulation desk. If a teacher needed to change a library time due to a field trip or holiday, I would pencil in the changes on paper. I know that this could all happen digitally, but I wanted to be able to approve each change and not have teachers rearranging an online library schedule themselves.

Show up for Open House Night

Library Open House Scavenger Hunt product cover photo

I know it takes time, and it’s a really long day, and it may not even be required by your admin, but I believe that it’s so important to show up for open house night (or meet the teacher or whatever your district calls its back to school event). Families who are new to your school will really appreciate meeting you and seeing familiar books and series in your library. You can be such a welcoming sight to your new students.

I’ve created an open house scavenger hunt that I think will add extra fun, give you a conversation focus, and help you connect with your school community.

Prioritize Relationships over Rules

My most important advice for back to school is to spend time building relationships: with your admin, with classroom teachers, with families, and, most of all, with your students. You want everyone to feel welcome in your library, and sometimes you may have to bend the rules a little bit to make that happen. For example, I had one principal who wanted me to spend the first week of school walking new students to their classes, rather than teaching library classes. It was a priority for my principal, that new students feel welcomed and not get lost, so I made that my priority, too. Was it in my job description? No. But a strong relationship with my principal made my whole school year better.

I know that organizing and following procedures is a huge part of our school librarian jobs, but we want to keep the relationships with our readers and our school community as a top priority.

Save this post for later

I know I covered a lot of ground in this blog post. You can click the image below to pin this post and refer back to it later. I hope you have an amazing school year!

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