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.

 

Getting men involved in literacy

We all know that kids often admire the men in their lives - and often it’s because men possess the mystery and charm that comes from keeping a greater distance than the many women in most kids’ day-to-day existences. For boys in particular, it means that whatever these men do, the kids will take seriously.

Because many men aren’t enthusiastic readers, and in particular not readers of books, boys often will quickly get the message that reading isn’t a thing that men do. The Reading Rockets site from WETA Public Television recently posted two pages of tips on ways for men to encourage children’s literacy. Here’s one, and here’s another from the National Literacy Trust in the UK. These pages were created with fathers in mind, but not all kids have fathers who play active roles in their lives. Depending on the family situation, moms’ boyfriends, or children’s uncles, grandfathers, and male family friends can fill this role, too.

The most important part of this message, though, applies to all of us who spend time around kids, and is titled “Walk the walk”:

Your child learns from what you do. Make sure the messages you are sending about reading tell your child that knowledge and literacy are valuable, achievable, and powerful.

All men who interact, even in small ways, with children need to get this message. It’s harder for those of us in public libraries to talk and work directly with the men we need most to reach - the ones who aren’t readers, yet have children at home. Any time we have the opportunity to speak with them, we should make it a priority.

 

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.

 

Reading Rockets and summer reading

Now that we’ve reached Memorial Day weekend and we’re on the cusp of summer, it’s - of course - time to be promoting summer reading programs in our libraries. One site that has some good material targeted at parents all year long is Reading Rockets, a site from WETA public television. They have a pretty good summer reading site, “Get Ready for Summer!” that’s more school- and teacher-oriented than public-library oriented, but it’s good to pass along to any parents and teachers who are looking for worthwhile material on reading.

While you’re at the Reading Rockets site, you should also scoot over to some of the good informational pages elsewhere on the site. I particularly recommend the “Strategies to Help Kids Who Struggle With Reading” page, which will point you to some brief but pithy articles that should interest parents with kids who are having reading problems. They can help parents - in particular parents who come from lower-income families - figure out how they can help, and get help for, their kids.

The important point we should all remember is here, and it’s kind of scary. But it’s true:

Unfortunately, the older a child is, the more difficult it is to teach him or her to read. The window of opportunity closes early for most kids. If a child can’t read well by the end of third grade, odds are that he or she will never catch up. And the effects of falling behind and feeling like a failure can be devastating.

I’ve seen so many boys, I mean kids, turn off to reading after third grade, because they didn’t get help soon enough. So we should be encouraging parents not to wait and not to delay. And we should be encouraging those parents to read, read, read aloud to their kids with reading problems.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Shall I tell you again? Why it’s good to repeat

Everyone who works with children aged five and under knows how kids of those ages love to have things repeated, and repeated, and… you know. I recently mentioned how I like to repeat the songs I sing in storytime, such as “The More We Get Together.” When I sing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” with toddlers and preschoolers, I sing it three times - once really slow, once normal speed, and once “fast enough to burn holes in your knees.” The younger they are, the more repetitions many children need to see and hear before you see their eyes light up and they’ve got it, and they’re ready to join in. And this afternoon I found a serendipitous quote about repetition.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Michnick Golikoff, and Diane Eyer wrote a book called Einstein Never Used Flash Cards (Rodale, 2003) that should be in every library’s parenting collection. The authors take aim at the “hurried child” syndrome that seems to drive many parents into getting their toddlers ready to enter Harvard by the time they complete their toilet training. Hirsh-Pasek, Golikoff, and Eyer instead want young children to learn the way they learn best - through playing, and yes, through slowly repeating things. Here they talk about educational TV shows that move at a young child’s pace:

We love Sesame Street, but there are also lessons in slow-moving, repetitive programs like Barney and Teletubbies that children enjoy. The developers of the famous show Blue’s Clues, for example, actually studied what children prefer in order to make their episodes maximally appealing. They found that children love repetition. Indeed, although it may be deadly for us (how many of us have fallen asleep midsentence?), children love to hear the same stories night after night - they get something new each time and enjoy finding predictable patterns.

So shall I tell you again? When you’re presenting songs and activities for young children, repeat generously.

 

Young children and “learning to read”

In this unfortunate educational age, in which the federal No Child Left Behind Law holds sway over our schools, we’ve seen a big push for young children to read at the age of 5 or even earlier. That first big standardized reading test that comes in the third grade scares every elementary principal nationwide, and the message goes down the line to the earlier grades and even the preschools: start drilling those kids in the two important testing subjects - math and reading.

A new study from the Center on Education Policy reports that 44 percent of 350 school districts surveyed admit reducing the time they spend on subjects and activities outside of elementary math and reading (i.e., things such as art, music, and even social studies). Anecdotal information from many teachers in many districts implies that an even greater number of schools are teaching specifically to the statewide test and sacrificing drawing, singing, and everything else that’s not numbers or printed language. This means that public libraries should take the opportunity to step up and present programs that share things like songs, chants, and storytelling with kids.

Redleaf, a publisher specializing in works about the education of young children, has a series of Guides for Parents that are designed to help parents of young children understand best practices for their education. I want to share a quote from Get Ready to Read! by Sally Moomaw, Brenda Hieronymus, and Yvonne Pearson:

Testing has become a pronounced part of the educational environment, and some elementary schools and even preschools teach lessons specifically to help children pass a test. This generally unhelpful practice is especially so in preschool. Preschools or child care centers may drill children over and over again in phonemes - the discrete sounds that make up a word. They may emphasize learning one letter per week, one at a time, isolated from a letter’s meaning within a word or situation. They may use worksheets, such as tracing letters, to teach writing. But, because their brains aren’t ready to process information on this level, this kind of teaching is generally a waste of time for preschool children.

I think we need more books like this one, and I recommend it for any library’s collection of books for parents.

 

Early literacy and libraries, explained

The other day I gave a talk on how to choose and share books with young children in ways that will make books appealing to kids. I present it several times a year to various groups of parents. This time it was for one of my favorite kinds of audiences - Head Start parents. Here in New York City, a lot of HS parents are immigrants, and I’ve always felt that once they hear what to do, so many of these parents will grab on to the how-to aspect of early literacy, and they’ll run with it.

These are parents who want their kids to succeed. When I hand out booklists, brochures, and anything else I can find to give them some direction, they take them all and ask if they can give the extras to their friends.

I was looking for materials I could share, and as I always do, I did a Google search for early-literacy material I could steal ideas from. Here are two pages that any librarian who looks for ideas and suggestions about young children and early literacy might want to visit:

The Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library has a nice page on its Library Foundation’s site called “Early Childhood Literacy: Fostering the Fundamentals.” It’s a great message to steal when your library might be looking for a way of expressing to any power-brokers in your community why the library’s role in early literacy is so important. One paragraph says:

According to Marilyn Jaeger Adams, author of Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print, the typical middle-class child is read to 1,000 to 1,700 hours before entering first grade, whereas a child from a low-income family is read to an average of just 25 hours.

The page describes how the library, through its childcare outreach program, reaches many of these low-income children - those whose parents aren’t likely to be library users. It’s a worthwhile read, and an even better example of how a library can sell itself to the public.

The other site I wanted to mention is the Brooklyn Public Library’s First Five Years site, with entertaining booklists, suggestions and video clips that encourage parents to interact with their young children.

More early literacy sites coming soon….