I am very fortunate. I have been able to work with the ALSC Early and Family Literacy Committee for the past two years, where bringing an equity, diversity and inclusion focus is now at the forefront of all our work. As we find current, relevant literacy research to share with the ALSC community, we are very intentional about integrating and including EDI perspectives.
Category: Blogger Early & Family Literacy committee
Research Matters
The ALSC Board charged the Early and Family Literacy Committee (EFL) to “identify, synthesize, and disseminate current research findings relevant to early and family literacy issues from library schools, scholars of education, and other advocacy sources to libraries, childcare providers, and community agencies serving young children (birth through age 8).”
Brain Exhausted? Streaming Media to the Rescue!
While I am not having quite as much difficulty concentrating as I did early on in the pandemic, delving deep into research articles has not gotten any easier. As part of my work on the Early and Family Literacy Committee, I have Google Scholar alerts for articles on the topics “early literacy” and “family literacy”. I receive a digest semi-weekly and skim through looking for articles relevant to our charge.
An Interview with Amy Forrester on Early Reader Work
The ALSC Early and Family Literacy Committee’s charge includes children from birth to age 8 and their families. Thinking about the first and second graders who are learning to read reminded me that Denver Public Library (DPL) has created a team to create best practices within their library system to better support these emerging readers. Amy Seto Forrester, who has served on the Geisel Committee, and who is one of mainstays for the Guessing Geisel Blog also works at DPL. I decided to see what she could tell us. Carol: What prompted DPL to work on emerging reader services and collections at DPL? Amy: In 2018 when DPL’s Grade Level Reading (GLR) Team was launched only 38% of Denver Public School (DPS) 3rd graders were meeting or exceeding expectations on the reading assessment (2018 Status of Denver’s Children, City of Denver, Office of Children’s Affairs, page 96). Put another way,…
Our Kids Learning from Play
One of the key tenets of Early Literacy is play. Play is an integral part in a child’s development. Play allows children to use their creativity to decipher the world around them and build critical thinking and problem solving skills. As librarians and educators, we use play in various programs to engage children in learning and reading. Play is how kids learn! But research tells us that it isn’t just physical play that is important to learning. Play also includes digital play, creative play, and playing with language through music and movement. Digital play has become just as important as physical play. Kids retrieve information from the internet as well as from books. This is true now more than ever before. In Research in Brief: Digital Play in Early Childhood Education: Supporting Children’s Relational Information Literacy research conducted by Theobald et. al. observed how digital play helped foster children’s…
Library Environment: Third Teacher & Invisible Hand
Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior. ~James Clear, Atomic Habits
When Early Literacy Research Feels Personal
Recently, one of the important little ones in my life was diagnosed as having autism. Leading up to the diagnosis, I’ve become increasingly focused on how best to continue to encourage his love of books (as an 11 month old, he had the longest attention span and joy for stories of any baby I’ve known) and thinking about what research tells us that might inform how best to present a early literacy storytime for him. Our ALSC Early & Family Literacy Committee discusses at each meeting our plans for our regular second Sunday of the month blog posting and at our September meeting, I confidently declared, “I’ll do something on the research about autism, early literacy and storytimes”. Then I promptly searched databases for peer-reviewed sources and tried to get my poor brain to process the language of research journals. I printed three articles and brought them back and forth…
Back to Basics Part IV: Keep on singing!
As a children’s librarian, one of the things I miss most about pre-Covid-19 public library life is the sound of children singing—singing with others at storytime or just singing out loud as they and their adults go about their business in the library. When children sing, their joy in this activity is contagious. And it makes me especially happy because I know, thanks to the research behind the Every Child Ready to Read (ECRR) parent education initiative, that singing is not only a fun activity for children, it helps children develop important early literacy skills. Singing is one of the five practices ECRR encourages adults to use to build a child’s early literacy skills. Singing helps children: hear the sounds and syllables in words, practice the rhythms and rhymes of spoken language, learn new vocabulary words and their meaning, learn the names of the letters that make up words, discover…