It’s Friday at #PLA2016! Today I attended a session entitled Middle Childhood Matters: Revitalizing Services and Programs for School Age Children by Peggy Thomas and Diane Banks of the Toronto Public Library.
This was an excellent presentation covering what they did and why they did it. A lot of their reasoning rang true for me personally. The trend to bring a lot of light and attention to the importance of reading to children birth to age five is particularly strong. As it well should be! The developmental stages that children go through in this time period and the importance of early literacy is well documented. However, it seems that we don’t have the same elevator speech for why library programming for six to twelve years is just as important. We need to be able to tell stakeholders such as parents, teachers, and funders why library programming is imperative for this age group as well. This is a time of self-discovery and finding one’s talents and interests. Once again, we need to demonstrate beyond middle grade programming is nice to have. We need to demonstrate that it is necessary.
The Toronto Public Library had such a multifaceted approach to this including outreach, after school clubs, and space innovation. They took into account languages spoken in their urban area along with what the barriers to program attendance were. Their afterschool clubs focused on topics that were really engaging for this group, but were not covered in the formal education system such as robotics, coding, magic tricks, and dinosaurs (!!!) They incorporated evaluation and assessment in order to make data informed decisions for the future. Additionally, there is a middle grade curriculum in development. This is pretty exciting stuff, folks!
They also discussed new space renovation specifically for this age group and the plans they have for the future. Feltro and the EverBright Wall were seriously cool. I really loved the ideas I came away with from this session. It was as if they put a title on an issue I was aware of but never thought to name.
Jessica
I loved this presentation! As a former teacher, I can testify that there’s so much happening during these years that seriously kills the love of reading in kids, especially boys. For many of them (mostly third graders) it’s their first time entering into the world of state-mandated testing. Everything in school becomes about close reads and short constructed responses… very little focus on authentic reading and writing experiences! (Depending on your state/school, of course). Plus it’s a weird middle ground where kids are too old for daycare but too young for many camps/programs. If your school doesn’t have an after-care option, you’re pretty much out of luck trying to find anything age-appropriate.
On a side note, I seriously want an EverBright Wall in my house!