It’s not too late for a few summer literacy ideas

Several times, I’ve pointed out the Reading Rockets site from WETA Public TV as a good place for library folks who work with kids to visit. I wanted to point out a couple of worthwhile articles on Reading Rockets that you might find worth a read.

One is called “Making Reading Relevant: Read, Learn, and Do!” For adults working with K-3 kids, it offers several activities that turn what’s in a book into a real experience. Don’t pass up any chance to let parents and other caregivers know that “making reading relevant,” putting printed words together with large motor skill activities and 3-D objects, is one of the most important things they can do - especially for boys, who are often behind girls in language development skills, and especially for kids whose parents have less education.

Making reading “relevant” makes the difference between a child who gives up on reading by the fourth grade and one who becomes fascinated with learning about new things through print.

Here’s another, called “Use Summer Fun to Build Background Knowledge.” One of the biggest problems children from lower-income families face in school is a lack of “background knowledge” - the basic information about how the world works that many school lessons, and books, assume that children of a particular age already have. But not all - particularly those kids who have gained most of what they know sitting and watching cartoons on video most days - may know things such as that the earth rotates around the sun and the moon around the earth, or how plants grow from seeds.

If you haven’t looked at Reading Rockets yet, pay a visit. It’s a great way to pick up lots of child development and literacy tidbits - the kind you can pick up and then pass along - quickly and pretty painlessly.

 

My third (and last) ALA conference post

I’m back from ALA, and I have to go back to work today. But before I do I wanted to post a few more quotes from the ALA conference. And I also wanted to give a cheer for our book cart drill team - the Austin Public Library Bibliofiles - which won the silver at the Book Cart Drill Team Championships on Sunday. (That’s them on the left.) They won a Demco book cart (yeah, that’s it in the picture) that was painted silver, with a little plaque on one end.

The Championship was MC’d by the comedy duo of John Scieszka and Mo Willems, who hammed it up shamelessly and had us all chanting “DEM-co!” (Demco sponsors the Championship) throughout. It was great to watch our homies place as we cheered them on. (Those book headdresses spin, by the way.)

I saw that Alan Sitomer, Los Angeles media specialist and YA author, was giving a program on encouraging boys to read, so of course I was there. He works in an inner-city high school with kids that are almost entirely Latino and Black, and they’re kids who many adults consider not worth spending much time or effort on. These kids are often mouthy or unmotivated. But Sitomer, who could be one of the dictionary definitions of the word “enthusiastic” (he was named California Teacher of the Year, and you can tell he really enjoys public speaking), told us, “You have to believe that kids are reachable. If you don’t, nothing will reach them.”

He uses computer time, Web resources, and any technology he can to get the young men he works with to read. But he also uses something as simple as handing out jokes, printed on paper. He said that when the more motivated students start laughing, the less motivated will read them, too. (Warning - the following jokes are boy jokes):

Q. Why do gorillas have big nostrils?

A. Because they have big fingers.

Q. What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup?

A. Anyone can roast beef.

Q. What do you call a hunk of cheddar that doesn’t belong to you?

A. Nacho cheese.

Sitomer says that for this group, many of whom are one bad grade or boring class from dropping out, he doesn’t try to tell them what they must do. “I let them tell me what they like,” he says, “and then I build bridges for them from their outside interests to what’s in the media center.”

I also went to hear T. Berry Brazelton, the Grand Poo-Bah of Pediatricians, who spoke Monday morning. He sat thoughout his talk, and seemed a little hard of hearing - but that wasn’t unexpected after he told us that he had just turned 90. (He said that members of Congress held a celebration for him in Washington, and “they asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I asked for $2 billion for children and their parents.” Ah, we wish.)

Brazelton said that the most important role for the public library should be to help parents understand child development. Anything librarians can supply and market to parents - books, videos, and programs - that will help them comprehend the ages and stages their children are passing through will help them feel more in control of what can be a stressful and confusing process.

He showed us a wonderful film clip of a 12-month-old boy who was passing through a phase Brazelton called “storage.” Brazelton kept handing the boy small toy figures, and after he filled his hands with them, he took them into his mouth, and then looked at his mother as if to say, “Aren’t I so great?” It was a lot of fun.

If you’ve never been to an ALA conference, go when you can. It’s a wonderful way to expand your “box.” (You know, the one they’re always telling you to think out of.)

 

Technology ages & stages

There’s a good article, “So Young, and So Gadgeted,” in the June 12 New York Times, by kids’ tech guru Warren Buckleitner. It’s meant to serve as a guide to parents about what tech gadgets currently on the market are appropriate for kids of which age. But I think it’s better to simply use it as a guide for when kids are ready for the Web. And although some parents seem really eager to get their little geniuses online ASAP, most kids can’t handle the Web in general until they’re able to read well.

Younger children can only function online when they are monitored by someone who is either an adult or a pretty good reader, or when they’re using developmentally appropriate game sites like these or these. Buckleitner reminds us that “Babies and toddlers cannot use a mouse until at least age 2 ½.”

And the vast majority of kids aren’t really ready to face the Web on their own until the age of 8 or so. It’s too confusing and too filled with ads and distracting animations to work well for kids any younger. That doesn’t stop some parents, though:

Some parents eagerly provide their children with technology. “My 4-year-old has been on the Web since he could sit up,” said Samantha Morra, a mother of two from Montclair, N.J. “My 6-year-old has an iPod and wants a cellphone, although my husband and I aren’t sure who he’d call.”

So ignore the names of the tech products and expensive Web site subscriptions Buckleitner mentions (after all, that’s his job), and read what’s left. Remember that kids’ use of the Web will explode as their literacy skills increase; the more they can read, the more they’ll be able to experience online. The more their keyboarding skills grow, the easier it will be for them, too.

Buckleitner knows what he’s talking about, but his job is to review expensive tech products that most kids will never have the chance to use. And most of the kids in your libraries are only going to be looking at the stuff that’s available free. The more we familiarize ourselves with the game sites and the Web sites suitable for younger (and lass literate) kids, the bigger help we’ll be.

 

New “literacy playground” at Toronto Public Library

Wow - take a look at this. Here’s a story in the Toronto Star telling us about the new children’s area in the new S. Walter Stewart branch of the Toronto Public Library, which features a “literacy playground” the likes of which plenty of us envious librarians who have created programs for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers would like to see in our own libraries.

The literacy playground cost the library about $100,000 CDN, and was designed by the same folks who create exhibits for big-time children’s museums. The Star’s story says:

To the right is the rocket ship, with small benches inside and a bin full of puppets for the puppet theatre cut out at the back.

Big wooden cubes on the floor offer all kinds of letter and shape activities.

The “wall of blocks,” created by the Ontario Science Centre, retells poems and nursery rhymes; a cursive writing table has letters carved into the top for children to trace. Two toddler computers, with brightly coloured keyboards and tiger-ear headphones, link directly to online books.

A big, red mailbox encourages children to write letters and “mail” them to librarians and there’s also a giant version of “Read Me A Book,” by local Toronto writer and artist Barbara Reid, mounted kid-height on the wall.

I would love to see how this idea of creating play areas that celebrate literacy develops. There’s no way to put up literacy-oriented play areas cheaply; it’s hard to come up with equipment that will give very young children the kind of sensory challenges they need, yet won’t fall apart when older, rougher kids spin and bang and toss all its parts to their limit. I hope these “KidStops,” as they’re called, will be successful.

And I like the way that the library has taken the six pre-literacy skills from “Every Child Ready to Read” and redefined them in a way that parents and caregivers with limited education - the ones who you always want to reach most - can understand. For example, the icky term “phonological awareness” becomes simply “I hear words” and “print awareness” becomes “I see words.” A great restatement; we should all use it.

 

Mem Fox headlining AZ early literacy summit

Tucson’s Pima County Public Library is hosting an early literacy summit titled “Creating a Community of Readers Starting at Birth.” The headlining speaker will be author and literacy advocate Mem Fox.

I’ve been a big Mem Fox fan for a long time. (See this post.) If you go to her site, you should visit the “Read Aloud” section, where you can absorb a little of her passion. And here are Mem Fox’s Read-Aloud Commandments. She says in this Arizona Daily Star article:

“Reading aloud to children between birth and age 5, daily, changes their lives forever,” Fox said via telephone from her home in Adelaide, Australia. “It changes their lives educationally, it changes their lives mentally, it changes their lives in terms of language development.”

This summit sounds as if it will be great, and I wish I could attend myself. I hope that her words about reading aloud fall upon more than the ears of the converted, though. The hardest part of hosting something like a “literacy summit” is that 90 percent or more of those attending - knowledgeable parents and literacy volunteers and professionals - probably already know that children of all ages need to be read to, and that all the parents who haven’t heard Fox’s words and really need to hear them are working, or at the supermarket, or taking the dog to the vet. They aren’t hearing the message, and they’re the ones who need reaching.

That’s why we, the librarians who are out on the floor, or who are visiting a school on a parents’ night, or who are speaking to parents at a preschool, need to be talking up books and encouraging parents to visit the library. Never pass up a chance to talk to the parents who haven’t been converted yet to the “gospel” of reading aloud. Never pass up the opportunity to do a commercial for reading aloud.

 

LeapFrog launches new reading toy this summer

Do you remember when LeapFrog, the educational technology company, had a huge hit with the LeapPad? It’s a device that many people feel helps older preschool and early elementary aged children gain early literacy skills. The LeapPads were bought by huge numbers of parents, and many found their way into preschools and school and public libraries. LeapPad sales peaked in 2003, bringing the company $330 million that year.

Sales of LeapFrog products have sagged since then, so the company has announced the new Tag Reading System, described in this New York Times article. The Tag, successor to the LeapPad, will launch this summer; I checked on the LeapFrog site, and you won’t find it there yet.

It’s a device with a pointer like a fat pen that allows children to touch words and illustrations in the series’ books and listen to characters say those words aloud or (on the illustrations) make smart remarks. The special Tag books will be imprinted with special dots that the “pen” reads when it comes into contact with the book. Several of the books planned for the system are books we already know, such as Ian Falconer’s Olivia and two of Jane O’Connor’s Fancy Nancy series:

Ms. O’Connor, who described herself as “not a very pro-technology person,” was a skeptic at first, but has since come around.

“Sometimes it might be easier for a child who is struggling not to have a parent breathing down their neck,” she said. “You get stuck, you tap a word. The only expectation is coming from you, the kid.”

If you read the story to the end, you’ll learn that LeapFrog has set the Tag Reading System up with a critical Web component. It will recommend to parents, after they’ve reported that their child has completed certain books the company sells, other LeapFrog books or products. Hey.

Will we be seeing these in libraries? Who knows? But I wouldn’t be surprised. List price for the basic Tag Reading System will be $50; additional books will cost $14 each.

I think that the question to be asked is: Why? Do we really need a tech toy like the Tag, or the LeapPad, or any of the new Fisher-Price early literacy toys or software, to teach kids how to read? No, we don’t, but kids love novelty and parents with too little time will always want to keep their kids occupied with something “educational.” I’d prefer to give them a big box of Legos myself, to help them grow up to manipulate the world.

 

Here’s more early literacy stuff worth a look

If you do a little searching, you’ll find all kinds of resources on the Web that will help you pass along worthwhile information to parents, caregivers, and teachers who work with kids aged five and under. Here’s one: a story from the Knoxville, TN, News Sentinel published this past September called The ABCs of early literacy. The most useful parts of the article are the sidebars on the lower left titled “Tips for reading to children” and “What children like in books,” with solid information from Amy Nachtrab of the Imagination Library program of the Knox County Public Library. But the whole article is worth pointing out to adults who care for young children.

Here’s a brief piece worth reading that’s two years old, but still current. “Teaching Your Child How to Track Helps Early Literacy” at the LiteracyNews.com site. The basic point is astoundingly simple - if you follow the words with your finger as you read aloud to your child without even saying that “these are the words you’re hearing,” many children grasp it quickly anyway, and I’ve heard from several parents through the years that their child learned how to read by following Mom’s, or Dad’s, or the babysitter’s finger, and then going back to read the story again with the words they’ve memorized. The LiteracyNews site is definitely worth a look, too.

And here’s a PDF document from the National Institute of Early Education Research that’s worth a look: “Early Literacy: Policy and Practice in the Preschool Years.” It’s from 2006, but that doesn’t mean that it’s no longer relevant. It’s intended for early childhood educators rather than librarians, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant to us, either. It stresses that there are lots of children out there in various preschool programs that come from different cultures and speak languages other than English at home, and that we need to be working hard to help those families and low-income families in general. In the public-library world, that means we need to be getting out of our libraries and building bonds with families who often aren’t comfortable in the library.

I hope there’s something here you can use.

 

Beginning With Books

Here’s the Web site of a Pittsburgh-based early literacy organization, Beginning With Books. (You might suspect that they have an association with Fred Rogers in their past and yes, they do.) This group targets all parents of young children - but especially lower-income families - and spreads the word about how important it is to read to children from infancy.

Beginning With Books releases every year the newest iteration of its “Best Books for Babies” list. It’s a particularly well-considered list of books that are developmentally appropriate for those under 18 months old. For librarians, it’s a great list two ways - it recommends books that you should be adding to your collection or have there already, and you can recommend the list to parents and local daycare staff and group leaders - especially those adults who think babies are “too young” for books.

The current list consists of great books for babies that were published in 2006. One of my favorites is Brian Pinkney’s version of the lullaby Hush Little Baby, depicted as the story of a father at what looks like the turn of the last century trying to console his baby daughter while Mom is gone for the day. If you haven’t used it for a baby lapsit program, Hush works well, especially if you sing it to the group and then repeat it and invite the adults to join in. But there are plenty of other great titles on the list, too, and the Web site has some great early literacy information to pass on, especially to those working with low-income parents.

 

Environmental Print in Libraries

Here at the Early Childhood Center of the New York Public Library, we have books on pre-literacy skills and early literacy all over the place. I picked up one of them the other day, Everyday Literacy: Environmental Print Activities for Children 3 to 8 by Stephanie Mueller (Gryphon House, 2005), and looked over some of the ideas.

The idea behind “environmental print” is as old as kids reading the back of a cereal box at the breakfast table. Once children become aware, at the age of 3 or 4, that there are letters and words everywhere around us - on signs they see out the car window along the highway, on labels and posters at the grocery store, and in the newspapers and magazines all around them, many children will try to decipher them. Smart adults around them will point out those signs and ads wherever they can - such as the McDonald’s Golden Arches, which also make a big “M,” or the words “green beans” on a can in the market. The whole idea about environmental print is that 1) children see printed letters and words everywhere in the real world, which communicates how important they are, and 2) in most cases, they will see the name of something on or near the thing itself - such as the McDonald’s or the can of green beans.

In Everyday Literacy, a book aimed at preschool teachers and other adults working with young children, Mueller offers a big stack of ideas for using things like ads and grocery items to communicate this sense of the realness of print. She says:

Adult interaction is vital to achieve the maximum benefit of using environmental print as a tool in literacy development. It involves gradually moving from context clues (pictures, cartoon characters, colors, shapes, photos, and so on) to the printed letters and words.

One activity, for example, involves making a map of the area with ads and flyers from local stores and other businesses pasted down where they’re located; another uses ads and labels from different kinds of food to build a food pyramid.

Most of these ideas are pretty involved for libraries, but I can definitely see something every children’s librarian can do. Make some big tagboard labels for things in your children’s room - especially where the young ones hang out - and cover them with clear plastic laminate. Put “rug” on your storytime rug, and “chair” on a few chairs, and “computer” on a PC. I recommend this book - put it into your collection, and show it to local preschool teachers and parents who are looking for ideas.

 

Are Bedtime Stories Going Away?

The Wilton (CT) Villager ran a story recently that wondered whether the classic American bedtime storytime is dying out. The finding comes from another study, “Reading Across the Nation,” (warning: this is a PDF document) recently released by the UCLA Center for Healthier Children. The document lists how much parents in each of the major ethnic/cultural groups in all 50 states are reading to their children, as well as what percentages of children are “Proficient” in reading in fourth grade.

All of us would like to see parents or caregivers reading to their children every day or every night, but not everyone can do that. The numbers you’ll see represent those who claim they do. The newspaper article says:

Bedtime stories were biggest in Vermont, where 67 percent of respondents claimed to read to children daily. Mississippi ranked last, with a score of 38 percent.

Pete Cowdin, co-owner of the Reading Reptile children’s bookstore in Kansas City, Mo., characterized the survey’s findings as “ridiculous.” Parents who read to their young children every day are “pretty rare in this day and age,” he said, and estimated the true percentage who do so as in the 20s.

I wonder what the true number is, but I can’t picture that 67 percent of families anywhere in this country read to their children every night - although I hope that it’s true. I think that the ages of children who are read to are mostly children between the ages of 2 and 8, but it would be interesting to see what percentages of children of each age are read to even a few days or nights a week.

As the story says, I’ll bet that many parents stop reading to their kids once they’re old enough to read on their own. Actually, we librarians know that those elementary grades are perhaps the most critical time to be reading to our kids - third and fourth grades in particular - because those are the grades when kids can become discouraged and stop seeing the fun in reading.

If you go into the actual PDF document, it’s nice to see that the document also lists how many children ages 0 - 5 there are in each state per public library. The US national average is 1,368 children, but the number in individual states varies widely - Utah, for example, has 2,155 children per library, while Vermont has 214.