The arrival of shorter days and longer nights up here in the Northern hemisphere is a bit of conundrum for me. I love the autumn weather and watching the trees change color but seriously do not love getting up for work while it’s still dark outside. However, all year round I love picture books featuring night-time themes. It might have something to do with how easy it is to recommend them as bedtime stories. It makes sense that reading books that take place at night will suit the situation of getting kids ready for bed as the sun goes down. Or, perhaps I am just into the visual aesthetic of night-time scenes and enjoy the many creative ways that illustrators portray them with shadows and glowing images. Whatever the reasons, I thought this was the perfect time of year to share some of my favorite night-themed picture-books with you all. Noisy Night by…
Category: Blogger Tess Prendergast
The Science of Reading: A Primer for Children’s Library Staff
I hope you enjoyed last month’s post called Understanding the Simple View of Reading. I am grateful for the positive feedback I have received. I think that it is vital for children’s library staff to understand how reading develops and how to support it. To inform how I teach my children’s library services and children’s literature courses, I recently joined the International Literacy Association. I immediately noticed many of the emerging resources are about something I have also been hearing a lot about in news media, as well as things like Reading Rockets. You may have heard about it recently too: The Science of Reading. What is the Science of Reading? The term “The Science of Reading” collectively refers to the vast, interdisciplinary body of research evidence gathered and published over several decades about how proficient reading and writing develop and how to prevent and address reading difficulties. It is important to note that…
Understanding The Simple View of Reading
Kids need to have strong language comprehension skills because these will ensure they have a good understanding of what words mean when they say them, hear them, sign them, or read them. They also need good decoding skills because they need to know precisely how letters represent the sounds that make up different words. Kids who can do both, can read.
Lullabies in the Library
I believe that singing lullabies is one of the most important things that parents and other caregivers can do to bond with and soothe their children. A lullaby, like all other songs shared with children, is also a great way to support a little one’s early literacy growth because lullabies have rhymes, rhythms, and new words just like any other type of song. As a practitioner and parent, I saw this to be true countless times over many years of bedtime lullaby singing to my own children and leading lullaby singalongs in my library programs. I parented in the era of cassette tapes and compact disks and learned some of my kids’ favourite lullabies by listening to tapes and CDs of Kathy Reid-Naiman, Raffi, Connie Kaldor and Pat Carfra (aka the “Lullaby Lady”) who are four of Canada’s icons in children’s music. Eventually, my program attendees learned their beautiful songs from me too, and I often heard…
Celebrating the Week of the Young Child 2023
The Week of the Young Child aims to focus attention on the importance of the early childhood stage, recognize the value of early childhood programs, and community services that support young children and their families.
Celebrating Board Books for Babies
Every year, I teach a survey of children’s literature class to MLIS students. After I have covered the history of children’s publishing, and children’s literacy development, I spend a whole class on books for babies. It’s one of my favourite classes because I get to bring an enormous stack of baby books to class and teach my students all about them. Reading to babies I start out by reminding them that human babies are born totally helpless and frankly – they don’t care what anyone reads to them. That being said, babies do want and need to be held and touched and interacted with. Books designed for babies do seem to offer parents and caregivers a nice way of doing just that: holding, touching, and interacting with their babies from their earliest days onwards. When babies are born, their vision is not fully developed so high contrast books with very clear and spare black…
Exploring refugee child experiences through picture books
Mirrors and Windows You have likely come across the metaphor “mirrors and windows” as it relates to children’s books before. It is a metaphor coined by Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop when she discussed how books can mirror a child’s own experiences – thereby legitimizing them by showing that people similar to themselves are important enough to be in books. Additionally, she said that books can also be windows through which children can see the lives and experiences of children who are different from themselves. (Bishop, 1990). I am going to apply this wonderful metaphor to some of my favorite picture books about refugee child experiences. Come with me as I explore the ways in which these books can be mirrors (for children with refugee backgrounds to see reflections of their family’s lives) as well as windows (for other children to grow in their understanding of people who have refugee backgrounds)….
Hands-on Storytime: Felt Stories & Early Literacy
In a 2004 School Library Journal article called “Children of the Cloth”, Renea Arnold and Nell Colburn say that flannel (or felt) stories “are a great tool to help kids learn early literacy skills.” (p.37) and I heartily agree with them. They acknowledge that felt stories have been a storytime staple for years in schools and libraries. They explain these fabric-based stories invite participation as young listeners try to guess what will appear from behind the feltboard or call out the name of the animal, letter, or object being put on the board. I especially appreciate that Arnold and Colburn emphasize how this kind of storytelling helps young children learn – that stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. Because felt stories usually emphasize sequences in visual way, as pieces of the story are put on the board one by one, or taken off one by one, children learn how stories work….