Nonfiction Signage

[Whitney Etchison]

We are trying to decide how to make our nonfiction section more user friendly for our students, who right now take one look at it and back quickly away. Our first need is better visual cues for what types of books are in each section. Does anyone have advice on what types of signs/visuals have worked best in your library for making the content of those sections more clear? Some of our non fiction shelves are waist high, and others are over 6 feet tall.

[Julie Udy]

I have put bright pink labels on each of the shelves. On each label the words listed designate the subject(s) of the books on that shelf. This seems to work. I am actually in the process of having a different color label for each of the dewey sections (hot pink for social issues, yellow for language, etc.). If they have a general idea of where to start looking, they can go to that area and scan the labels and find the books they are looking for. They aren't anything fancy, but they do seem to work.

[Whitney Etchison]

Thanks Julie! This is the first time I've every posted on a Ning, so it was great to have such a quick and helpful reply.

[Cathy Nelson]

Have you considered have the kids create Wordles for assigned shelves? This would be unique and somewhat interactive too.

[Whitney Etchison]

That's a good idea too... maybe we could combine it with the color coding.

[Mary Ellen]

I recently used Comic Life to make colorful signs for the topics kids most often request, e.g., sports, World War II, weather, countries, music, history, health, etc. I laminated them and just taped them above the general area where they could be found. Each sign is 1/4 of a page (portrait). It's too soon to tell how helpful they will be.

[teacherninja]

We redid the ones in our LMC recently. I used creative commons licensed photos and the IMPACT font on picnik.com to make them. Now there are bold words with images for the non- to low- reading and/or ELL elementary students. They turned out great and didn't take too long to make. I resized photos to make them all the same. Good luck!