{"id":12832,"date":"2016-04-08T22:18:26","date_gmt":"2016-04-09T02:18:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/?p=12832"},"modified":"2016-04-09T09:23:58","modified_gmt":"2016-04-09T13:23:58","slug":"the-forgotten-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/the-forgotten-years\/","title":{"rendered":"The Forgotten Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Friday at #PLA2016! Today I attended a session entitled Middle Childhood Matters: Revitalizing Services and Programs for School Age Children<\/em> by Peggy Thomas and Diane Banks of the Toronto Public Library.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

They also discussed new space renovation specifically for this age group and the plans they have for the future. Feltro<\/a> and the EverBright Wall<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 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\u2019t 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[134,151,924],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-blogger","category-live-blogging","category-pla-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}