Rain Gutter Bookshelves

Rain gutter bookshelves for kids are the best idea for organizing your child's books that I've seen so far. I had never heard of them before and did some looking around to see what they are all about and apparently, there are a ton of ways to use rain gutter bookshelves. Some are actually rain gutters transformed into forward facing bookshelves and some are custom made shelves that just look kind of like a rain gutter. Either way, the idea is fabulous and affordable.

So why do you want a forward facing book shelf? Well not only do they conserve much needed floor space but they also encourage reading in children. If you think about the way that humans shop, and kids too, we look at the pictures and more often than not choose the best looking item with the prettiest picture from the shelf. Grocery stores stock cereal for children on low shelves at eye level with the pictures facing forward for this reason...to attract them and make their favorites easy to reach. This is the same idea, just applied to their books. They are able to see what story it is by its picture and they are right within their reach. Take the advice of the cereal marketers and put the pretty pictures in font of those kiddos...they'll be more likely to grab a book and take a peek inside.

While I was checking them out I found a few different sites offering free tutorials on how they did it for their children. My favorites are:

Poppies at Play

Helping Little Hands

I love the way that she uses the real "rain gutters"here:

The Stories of A 2 Z

These bookshelves are a great tool to help in organizing your child's room too. Organizing my daughters books has been such a challenge in our home with stacks and bins everywhere. Wall shelves get everything up off of the floor and makes use of wall space. Rain gutter shelves have also been shown to help your little ones put the books away on their own. The shelves easy access allows kids to put away their book as easily as they took them out to read. I have a hard time shoving the books into our standard bookshelf myself, so I'm not sure how I could expect my 3 year old to get them in there! Also, with that amount of kids books in all shapes and sizes it can be challenging to make them look nice or organized on a standard shelf whereas with rain gutter shelves, they almost look better the more varied the books are in size, shape, and color.