Building a Family-Friendly Home Library
By Melissa Barreto
“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books.”
– Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Encouraging a love for reading begins with creating a literature-rich environment at home. And as the famed children’s book author Roald Dahl advises, creating a home library can be a great place to start and a wonderful way to help make reading a regular habit for the whole family.
The key to creating a family-friendly library is to approach it as a core gathering space in your home. You want to create the kind of space that invites the whole family in to spend time regularly, rather than being treated like an afterthought or simply stuffing a bookshelf into a corner of a child’s bedroom where no one else has access to it.
Creating an Inviting Space
I’ve gone through many versions of a family library over the years and the one that’s worked best, and that we still have today, is the one that functions like a key gathering space in our home.
Making your home library inviting for your family to gather means making sure that it’s located in a prime spot in your home. It can be a front room, a guest room, a main living room, a den, a sunroom, or even a dining room! Think of where your family likes to gather and go from there.
In our home, the library is at the front of the house, right off the front entryway. It’s the first room you enter in our home and it’s usually the last room to get the lights turned out at night.
The core of any home library is the book-filled shelves. But to keep the space inviting and make it a truly cozy, gathering space for the family, also consider including:
- A soft rug
- A comfy couch or pair of chairs
- A coffee table
- A reading lamp
- A throw blanket
- A few plants
- Kids’ art or projects on display
- A few board games or puzzles
- A couple of fidget toys to help squirrely kids focus while reading
- A jar of bookish tools like bookmarks, pens, highlighters, or sticky notes
Editing the Family Library
Once you have your inviting space set, it’s time to begin filling the shelves. I like to think of the family library as something that grows and changes as the family does. The same way our families go through different ages and stages, so will the library. When considering what kinds of books to put on the shelves, it’s important to stay flexible and be open to watching the books change over time. What your library looks like when you have toddlers or young children will change as those young ones grow to become tweens and teens, and that’s okay.
In our family, the children range from toddlers to teenagers, so our home library is fairly diverse in content. Some categories I like to always keep on hand for the children include board books, picture books, select early readers, short chapter books, longer chapter books, poetry books, graphic novels, and select non-fiction reads that tie into our homeschool studies. Since my children love to create, I also keep plenty of books on hand that help encourage my children’s skills-building and creativity like cookbooks, art books, craft books, and maker's manuals.
Once you know what kinds of books you want the family library to contain, you can set them all out and start deciding how to organize them.
Organizing Your Family Library
At most libraries, you’ll find books are sorted and organized according to the Dewey Decimal System. This numbered library classification system was created in the late 1800s to help large amounts of books be organized by general subject and then by author’s name. Since your home library likely won’t have as many books in it as your town’s library does, choosing a complicated numbering system probably isn’t necessary.
Other organizational systems include organizing by color, by genre, or alphabetically. All of these systems work well. The key is choosing the one that works best for you and your family.
Organizing by Color
If your brain prioritizes aesthetics, organizing by color can be a beautiful way to approach your home library and is often advocated for by interior designers. Color coding also works well if your library is relatively small and doesn’t have a lot of books. It can also be helpful if your family has very young children who may not read independently yet and are unable to return a book back to a specific section by genre or title. Young children can, however, easily return books back to a colored category.
A con to color coding I’ve found is that if your home library has many books, organizing them by color can actually make it harder to find what you need when you need it. When we think of what books we want to read, we don’t usually think “I want to read a red book,” we think ‘I want to read an adventure story,” but a color system alone likely wouldn’t allow us to locate that story easily.
Organizing Alphabetically
For those who love highly-organized spaces, organizing your library alphabetically can be extremely satisfying. This can also help train your children for browsing town library shelves as it’s a step closer to the Dewey system. The alphabetical organization also works well when you have lots of books to sort through or many books by the same author.
A con to this system I’ve found is mainly with the children. Many children don’t always remember the authors of the books they read or want to read. So, once again, when they are looking for a specific genre or subject to read about, finding the book they want may prove to be difficult.
Organizing by Genre
Over the years I’ve found organizing books by genre one of the easiest ways to keep our home library accessible for everyone in the family. It’s definitely not as pretty as color coding the shelves, and it’s not as highly organized as an alphabetical system, but organizing by genre allows most children to easily find and return the books they need with little fuss. It also makes it easy to see how many of each kind of book I have at any given time in case something needs to be replaced or restocked.
One con to the genre organization is for very young children who may not yet understand what a book genre is and for children who feel a book falls under more than one genre at the same time. In these cases, finding and replacing may get tricky.
Keeping Your Home Library Stocked
How many books you decide to keep at home for your family is up to you. Book lovers know well that if you feel yourself running out of room, you can always squeeze in another shelf.
One of my favorite places to get books for home is actually the public library. Many libraries, especially in the Summer, hold public book sales for the community where many good books can be purchased at hugely discounted prices. Libraries do this to help ensure the books available for checkout are in the best condition possible. So, if you don’t mind a few page wrinkles or cover scratches, public library sales are wonderful for stocking up the home library. The last sale our local library had sold children’s paperbacks for only 50 cents! Hardcover books were $1. Many libraries also have a free shelf where older copies of library stocks are put out for free waiting to be rescued by book-loving families.
Used bookstores are another place I like to frequent for stocking our home library. These are community gems, with ambiances that often make you feel like you’ve entered a hidden magical world with old books, magazines, and even records stacked from floor to ceiling.
Lastly, trading books with friends is a wonderful way to get old books out of your house and bring new books in. So, if all else fails, call up your book-loving friends and do a free swap.
Reading as a Family
Remember, your home library is not just a space to store your books, but a place where your whole family should be able to gather and spend time.
Including your family in the process of building the library can help encourage a habit of using the space regularly and making reading a family habit. Try including your children in deciding where to place the library, what books they want to include, and how they want to organize it all. Include your spouse in picking out shelving and decorating the space so it can be welcoming for all. The more of a role the family takes in creating the space, the more likely it is that it becomes a resource for treasured family time in your home.
(Melissa Barreto is a home educating mother of five children and the Co-Founder of Wildflower Homeschool Collective, a homeschool organization based in Northern New Jersey.)
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