Union County Carnegie Library
The Better World Books Literacy Grant will help make our Early Literacy Learning Lab a reality! Over the past few years, the Union County Carnegie Library has worked to build meaningful partnerships with community agencies dedicated to helping young children and families learn and grow together. We are excited to build on our current resources and expand them to better serve our community as a result of Better World Books.
Currently, 1 in 5 adults in Union read at or below a third grade level, and only 1 in 4 kids graduates high school in four years. Additionally, only 25% of students enrolling in kindergarten demonstrate a readiness to learn and only 5% of second grade students are on track for success in English Language Arts when entering the third grade. The Union Library has partnered closely with Union County First Steps over the last few years to address these issues. Through this partnership the library has added learning kits for families and educators working with children ages birth – 4, which can be borrowed from the library and focus on evidence-based curriculum topics. Additionally, First Steps provides funding to support early literacy programs at the library, and the library provides more than 75 early literacy programs with more than 1500 participants each year.
The $4,696 Literacy Grant from Better World Books will be used to expand resources available to Union County’s youngest community members, ages birth – 4 years old, by helping complete an early literacy learning lab (ELLL). The ELLL will include the resources provided through First Steps, as well as educational activities for young children that help foster fine and gross motor skill development, early literacy, and emotional development. This designated safe space will provide tools to help parents educate their children, even if they themselves struggle with literacy and reading. By enabling parents and caregivers to provide educational opportunities to young children, the Library can help address and overcome the barriers preventing children from being ready to learn when entering kindergarten. Our goal is to ensure that every child enters kindergarten with the foundation needed to be successful throughout their lives.
Cedar Bluff Middle School Library
Our plan is to supplement the library’s model of lending books and supporting literacy through book talks, book clubs, and class collaborations with an additional element of gifting books. We plan to launch a “birthday books” program that will provide each student in our building with one free, high-quality book to own every year on their birthday. Students on an advisory committee, in partnership with the librarian, school administration, and English department, will be the driving force behind the delivery of this program.
Recent efforts to increase the books in students hands have been successful; for example, this past year the librarian and sixth grade English department launched an initiative for students to perform book talks on books of their own choosing. All of the approximately 200 sixth grade students had delivered at least one book talk by the end of the year, and circulation statistics in the library have increased significantly over previous years. Between August of 2016 and March of 2017, 1,691 books were checked out to patrons at Cedar Bluff Middle. In the same time span during this 2018-2019 school year, 4,173 books have been checked out. We can be confident this also indicates an increase in student reading based upon the data collected through book talks, book requests, and student library attendance. This data demonstrates there is a need and a demand for high-quality reading material in our community. The library wants to continue to build our ability to serve the development of students’ literacy skills, and believes helping build home libraries is an important facet of the next step in our programming.
We are motivated by recent research findings covering 42 nations and suggesting that home book ownership can make a statistically significant positive impact on literacy (Evans, Kelley, Sikora, 2014). The primary study referenced was conducted over 20 years, and also seems to counter the often leveled counter argument that book ownership is merely a signal that people from privileged backgrounds have advantages that lead them to succeed, and the ownership of the books themselves is merely a signifier and not a contributor to that success. On the contrary, the researchers found that “regardless of how many books the family already has, each addition to the home library helps children do better… [and] the enhancement is greater for families with little education and low-status occupations” (Evans, Kelley, Sikora, 2014). This data gives us confidence that an initiative like the “Birthday Books” program will benefit every student in our building, not just those who already have thriving home libraries. There is also reason to believe that the benefits can extend beyond the student who receives the book themselves, but also the members of their household who would have access to the book in the home after it is gifted.
The implementation of the program will involve the student body at every step, making sure their benefit is maximized and diversified. A small student advisory board will help design the implementation plan for the program. We cannot wait to get started!
Lancashire County Council Libraries
The Sharing Stories project aims to develop adult literacy around Lancashire. The project will work with a variety of groups who struggle with literacy in the broadest sense of understanding, interpreting, creating, communicating, and sharing a love of words. Across Lancashire significant numbers of adults struggle with literacy and reading. This has a direct effect on children’s literacy which in many parts of Lancashire falls below the National Average by the age of 11.
Through the Better World Books Literacy Grant, Lancashire County Council Libraries will be working with a number of adult groups across the county to provide a series of open and welcoming opportunities in a safe environment where literacy is fun, there are no mistakes only learning, and support is always there. These opportunities will give adults with low literacy the confidence to connect in branch and digitally (audio and e-books). Sharing Stories aims to support more adults across Lancashire to have a more fulfilled and productive life.
Sharing Stories will include family storytime sessions, audiobooks awareness, supporting English as a second language and shared reading with adults with a learning disability. Across Lancashire, there are 59 libraries and all the branches will be participating in Sharing Stories and developing staff awareness and skills to support literacy development with adults.
“This is really great news. The grant for our Sharing Stories project will enable us to develop adult literacy, reading and a love of stories by working with a variety of different groups, including adults with a learning disability, adults who have English as a second language and adults who struggle with low literacy. I know how hard these grants are to achieve and this success is strong recognition of the excellent work of our library service.”
County Councillor Peter Buckley, Lancashire County Council’s cabinet member for community and cultural services
District of Columbia Library
The STAR Club will be offered at 10 libraries and/or at community-based sites. Each session will include 3-6 classes, 1-2 hours each. Classes will be limited to 15 parents/caregivers and their children.
The curriculum begins with research about the enormous impact of early experiences and exposure on brain “wiring.” Then the focus shifts to the six skills that prime children’s readiness to learn to read—print motivation, phonological awareness, vocabulary, print awareness, letter knowledge, and narrative skills.
Classes will include the skills themselves, and their impact on a child’s pre-reading ability, and hands-on activities of creative play, reading a book aloud, singing rhyming songs, learning rhythm activities and puppet play. Take-home flannel boards will have added pieces week-to-week. A board book will be taken home each week. An inflatable beach ball will be taken home for a playful way to learn shapes—the basis for letter awareness as the child gets older. A shaker egg will be taken home to reinforce rhythm as an ingredient in understanding syllables. The activities offer variety for the parents/caregivers and are fun.
A later get-together will be scheduled so parents/caregivers can share what they’ve been doing, to raise problems, and to reinforce lessons learned.
South Park Township Public Library
According to the American Institute of Research the number of public school students diagnosed with autism has increased over 500% in the last ten years and the cost of educating an ASD student is at least $8,000 more than a non ASD student. The national average for children with ASD is 1 in 150 children. In the South Park School District during the last five years the prevalence of ASD children in the incoming kindergarten class averages 1 in 43.
The South Park Township Public Library will be collaborating with the South Park School District as well as ASD specialists from state appointed agencies in Allegheny County to develop specialized multi-sensory literacy engagement kits.
These kits will be developed around themes that respond to a framework that is based upon the five Big Ideas of literacy “Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Comprehension, Fluency and Vocabulary” as well as the five senses of taste, sight, hearing, smell and touch.
The kits will be broad enough to include the diversity of literacy learning as well as flexible enough to be customized to the personal interest of the learner. The team will engage educators, artists, and musicians in the development of uniquely produced material. ASD students will have opportunities to create materials for the kits. As these kits will be developed through extensive interaction with students, they will in their completed form, provide a new mechanism for understanding literacy development.
Swea City Public Library
Our library is in a very rural part of Iowa, right next to the Minnesota border. We are the only building in town to offer computer/internet to our community. I am the one and only employee and I could not imagine another job that could hold my heart as my library does.
Since I am the only employee I have to also be available to our patrons as they come in. The tricky part is I invite our local Day care as well. These children only see the inside of the library because of the cooperation of the day care staff. They are mostly very low income and their parents do not use our facilities. I am their only chance to make the library a part of their lives. I am the one who sets their sights on what I can offer them, who plants the seed that I foster week after week knowing they see our building as one they can return to time and time again seeing a face they already know so well.
I wanted to make a space for all of my littlest patrons. Not only for Toddler Time but one they can take ownership of when they visit me. Our building is small, tan and adult. I want happy, color and child sized everything for them. I want them to walk into their space and feel they are special. I would love to have a big happy rug, bookshelves that are their height, small tables and chairs, new books that are just for them. I really believe giving them something they can claim will imprint on their little minds that the library is a place they can call a second home.
Our community has lost our grocery store and so much more. Our children have nowhere to go in our town. I need to do everything in my power to have a facility where they feel safe and wanted. One where they can come in for a moment or settle in for hours.
