How to Organize Children’s Books in 3 Steps

This post may contain affiliate links. If you choose to make a purchase through these links, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. I do not promote anything I do not believe in or stand behind.

Sharing is caring!

We own many children’s books in our house. We love every one of them.

I love reading and raising readers is important to me, but the sheer number of children’s books in the house can be overwhelming at times. 

As our children’s book collection grew and started to take over our living room, we needed to set up a system for managing and organizing all the children’s books. Plus, I wanted to establish a rotation for the books to keep them fresh and guarantee all of our books were getting the same amount of love.

It took a few years and some hard work to set up our system, but now it is a lifesaver and helps us control the growing book collection.

My hope is that this post will give you and your family some ideas for organizing the children’s books in your home! 

Sort the Children’s Books

To start setting up our book organization process, we brought all of the children’s books to one location. This helps us see all that we own.

This part was probably the most time-consuming part of the process, but totally worth it! 

We went through all of the books. Yes, all of them! We made decisions about the books. 

We decided if there were any we didn’t want to keep. We donated these books to friends, teachers, and our neighborhood Little Library. 

I owned a lot of picture and chapter books from my teaching days. I wanted to slim this collection down. A lot of the books were ones that I knew I wouldn’t use any time soon with my young kiddos. Therefore, I donated these to friends with older kids and teachers who would use them now. I tagged the rest and sold them at a JBF Consignment Sale in which I participated. We sold a few at our neighborhood garage sale, too! Teachers love garage sales and the perfect place to find books to stock a classroom library without breaking the bank.

I would rather get the books in the hands of parents and teachers who would enjoy them now than keep them stored in a closet for sometime in the future. Of course, if the book was special to me and was a favorite from my childhood, I most certainly held onto it!

Once we finished going through and making decisions about the children’s books in our collection, we started sorting the books we were keeping. The easiest way to sort initially was by season/holiday as many of our books were for specific seasons. Another way to categorize the books is by theme (animals, things that go, fairy-tales, etc.).

Now that we have categorized children’s books, it’s time to put them away! 

Contain the Books

We keep books in a basket in the living room. These include seasonal books and a few favorites we rotate throughout the year. We store the interactive books (Touch and Feel, Lift the Flap, Look and Find) in this basket. These types of books keep my toddler engaged as he sits and pages through each one.  

Our nonfiction, reference, learning and activity books (Sticker Books, Wipe-Clean Books, Coloring Books, etc.) work well in the activity room. The activity room is where we do our at-home preschool learning, art projects and crafts. 

After watching an episode of The Home Edit, I put the books on the shelves by color. Not only does it look pretty, it is easy for my husband and kids to put the books away. It also helps my toddler learn his colors. 

We organize the rest of our children’s books by season/theme and store them in these clear plastic storage bins in our basement closet. The bins fit perfectly on this metal wire shelf. We use these storage bins for organizing our children’s toys, linens, outgrown clothes, party supplies, etc.!

Within each season, I break the books into themes. Then I generally do one theme per week. I love bringing out new books each season. Well, they are not necessarily new, but feel new because we haven’t read them for several months. My kids get excited to read the books when I bring them out. 

We have a basket of books in the car. The books we keep in the car are sound books, books with buttons to push and Disney read-along stories for long car rides. We have family who live more than an hour away so we need entertainment for the kids. These books are great screen-free entertainment for the car! 

The kids have a shelf of books in their bedroom. My son has a cube shelf and my daughter has a pocket sling bookshelf for her books.

Their bedrooms contain books specifically gifted to them such as personalized books and ones that match their interests. Occasionally we will go through these and bring a few down to the living room for browsing and reading, but for the most part these books stay in their rooms. We read books before nap and bed every day. Both kids always read books in their room after they wake up. 

I love having books accessible to my kids all around the house. This system of organizing, managing and rotating our children’s books works for us and definitely took some time to set up!

Our collection has grown a lot over the years, especially since becoming an Usborne book lady! As a former teacher, I built quite the book collection for many years. We have several friends who will donate outgrown books to us, too, which we love!

Now that we have designated spaces for our books and a system for organizing and managing the amount of children’s books, we feel less like our book collection is taking over the house. While it took some time to set up, every minute was worth it!

Sharing is caring!