In this installment, I’m going to be talking about the difficulties in moving some non-fiction into Picture Book City.
For the most part, integrating non-fiction into the subject categories was a really easy thing to do. Animals? Straight into Nature. Community Helpers? Growing Up / Jobs. Fairy tales, nursery rhymes, songs, everything had a place. Except for a lot of the 100s.
Where do we put those books on loss? Divorce? Abuse? Should we create a Parenting Section and move all those titles there? But what about the picture books like “I Remember Miss Perry” (teacher loss) and “Remembering Crystal” (friend dies) that were already in picture books? Should we pull all the tough topic books out?
After a few days of asking Twitter for suggestions about Parenting Sections, I ultimately decided that we didn’t have the shelf space or the need to have a parenting section. But I needed to make a rule about what kind of books went into Picture Book City and what books went in J Non-Fiction.
Where to put this?
I decided that topics that every child goes through (loss, in particular) should go in Picture Book City if it was in picture book format. Topics that are not universal (divorce, abuse) wound up in J Non-Fiction. We have updated our pathfinders for parents who are hesitant to ask for books, and are monitoring the situation to see if I need to re-think the decision.
Part of Picture Book City is taking a chance, making a change, and be willing to throw it out if it doesn’t work!
Next week, I’ll talk about our largest section so far — Favorites.
storytime katie 
I love your Picture Books City graphic. Did you develop it yourself?
I did! I purchased the art online and did the text in Photoshop Elements.
You are so mysterious, may I ask where you found it? I love it and would like to use it.
Veer[dot]com — I don’t mean to sound mysterious, sorry! It is a purchased piece of art. I paid ten credits for it. (Not sure what that is in dollars.)
Thanks!
We’re right now dealing with these types of books in our collection. We don’t have our picture books arranged by subject (YET!) but our PBs are really tight and I’m wanting to pull out the books that I think are mainly used for teaching / by parents and put them in our parents section. The books have been pulled out and I’m now making the decision which to move to the parents’ shelves. I like how you’ve divided those topics!
Thanks, Abby. It took me like a week to decide how to do it. I love this project and believe in this project, but it is very hard being the only one making decisions.