|
Blair County Library System Wins 2008 Best Practices Award |
|
Members of the Blair County Library System and United Way along with Senator John Eichelberger and Katherine Ayers, Author of Pennsylvania's One Book for 2008 Up Down and Around |
Paula Sell and Michelle McIntyre Roaring Spring Community Library, Katherine Ayers, presenter, and Tim Salony, System Administrator Blair County Library System |
|
|
|
Blair County Library System earns statewide award Harrisburg, PA - The Pennsylvania Library Association has honored the Blair County Library System with its Best Practices in Early Learning Award for its innovative program, Sprouting Readers. The Blair County Library System program was selected as a "best practice" in the fifth annual Pennsylvania Library Association's Best Practices Awards for Programming and Services to Children under the Age of Six, Their Families and Caregivers. The awards honored 18 Pennsylvania public libraries for programming in early literacy. The library earned its award in the category Programs Serving At-Risk Children and Families in the medium library division. Awards were presented April 2 at the fifth annual Early Learning Forum and Best Practices Luncheon, Pennsylvania Libraries: Learning Starts Here! - an education session attended by several hundred librarians, advocates, and policymakers at the Hilton Harrisburg. Here's how the award-winning program evolved: Aware that some families were simply not able to get into the library with their 3-to-5-year-olds for traditional daytime story programs, Michelle McIntyre, director of the Roaring Spring Community Library, designed Sprouting Readers, a special program for caregivers as part of her work on a master's degree. "We wanted to have a non-traditional-hour story time," McIntyre said. "We've had much more participation, and parents said they enjoyed having an evening activity with their children that was not a sporting event." But her work on the program went far beyond simply shifting the time of the program to the evening. McIntyre's six-week program was designed to give parents a deep understanding of six pre-reading skills that give children a head start in learning to read well. These include such things as being able to distinguish the different sounds of a language, being able to identify letters, understanding that words and pictures have meaning, being exposed to and understanding as many words as possible, knowing how to listen to and tell a story, and finding books interesting and wanting to read them. All of this was conveyed in what felt to participants very much like a regular story time, with readings, finger play, games, and rhymes. However, each session focused in a special way on one of the pre-reading skills. The program was so successful at Roaring Spring that it was also presented in all eight Blair County libraries. For libraries beyond Blair, the program has been developed into a manual that is available at no cost. "We took the educational benefits and emergent literacy skills that are implicit in a story time and made them explicit," McIntyre said. In addition to serving the needs of the target families, Sprouting Readers conforms to the funding requirements of the United Way of Blair County. Many grantors, obliged to demonstrate that they are spending their funds wisely, are requiring those who receive funds to demonstrate that their programs are well-focused and achieving what they say they will do. Sprouting Readers included pre- and post-program assessments and other data that could show the progress of caregivers and children. But McIntyre's primary goal remains the same as that of every other public librarian in Pennsylvania: "We are open to serve the public." The Blair County Library System program is important first because of its early literacy services to the citizens of Blair County. The Best Practices Award celebrates public library programs that are especially creative, innovative, and effective in serving young children, their families and caregivers. The Best Practices Award was also designed to "spread the word" by publicly highlighting effective early literacy programs that can be replicated in other libraries throughout Pennsylvania. Awards were presented by writer and educator Katherine Ayres, of Pittsburgh. Her book, Up, Down, and Around, is this year's selection for the One Book, Every Young Child initiative. One Book, Every Young Child is a statewide literacy initiative, a collaborative project to promote the development of early literacy skills through interactive experiences with books and stories. More than a half million Pennsylvania children ages 3-6 are reached annually through the One Book, Every Young Child program, which stresses the importance of reading early and often to young children and how that impacts their future lives.
|
