October 26, 2017
Soon after, mom Becky and kids, Ella, 12, Roc, 10, and Callie, 8, became regulars at the Port Orchard location’s STEM Friday events and at Manchester’s monthly LEGO Club.
For Melissa Keberlein, library storytimes at the Silverdale location were a lifeline when her daughter Hannah was 7 months old and her husband was out to sea.
“Storytime was kind of our savior,” she said. “It was our first activity I ever did to get out of the house.”
The families’ experiences illustrate the breadth of children’s programming at the library and the key areas of focus – STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and early literacy.
STEM is a top priority because careers in those areas are growing three times as fast as other fields, but the state of Washington can’t fill the demand for qualified workers. To support the community’s goal of growing the local workforce, the library focuses K-12 programs on helping students develop and hone such 21st-century skills as critical thinking, adaptability, collaboration and communication.
For a science lover like Ella Futrell, the STEM programs are also fun. That was especially true when she won a STEM Friday engineering challenge by building a paper platform that held a whopping 24 books.
“Some of the books were thick,” she recalled.
“They were bringing over the big encyclopedias,” her mom agreed.
The secret to Ella’s super platform was a support system of tightly rolled paper cylinders. It’s a technique she learned at school and it illustrates how library programs dovetail with and extend in-school learning for K-12 students.
Shannon Peterson, the library’s director of public services, said programs are crafted to complement classroom learning, while also giving kids and teens a voice in what they want to learn.
“Schools can’t do it alone,” she said, noting that kids spend 81 percent of their time outside of formal learning environments. “We want to be a true partner and take what our educational partners are doing in a school day and build on it.”
The library has more flexibility than schools and can approach STEM in a different way, she said, developing learning activities based on kids’ interests, rather than testing requirements. “We can take whatever kids are interested in and make it STEM.”
“I think it’s important because that is the way our future is with jobs and technology and science,” said Becky Futrell.
For younger patrons, the library helps build foundational skills with more than 1,100 storytimes a year. To support parents as their children’s first teachers, librarians also have created such resources as “100 Books Every Child Should Hear Before Starting Kindergarten,” and curated about 60 Early Literacy Kits, backpacks filled with picture books, a resource guide for parents and an educational toy or activity.
“We blazed through those (literacy kits),” said Keberlein, whose daughter Hannah is now 3 and still delights in attending storytimes. “They would have 10 stories and (Hannah) would pick one she would absolutely love and we’d read it about 100 times.”
Storytimes, which include finger plays and songs as well as picture books read aloud, are more than entertainment. They are a chance for librarians and other adults to model literacy and STEM skills to parents, while also providing a safe environment for children to practice social interaction, emotional awareness and self-regulation. One reason for the intensive focus: About 85 percent of a child’s brain develops by age 3.
With that in mind, the library also partners with community organizations, such as Ready for Kindergarten, which provides free child-development classes for parents and caregivers in the South and Central Kitsap school districts. And youth librarians provide outreach to preschools and daycares, visiting them regularly to provide storytimes and hosting them at the library.
Keberlein still takes Hannah to the Silverdale location every week, and both mother and daughter are delighted when staffers greet the toddler by name.
“They’ve become our little library family,” said Keberlein. “They all know her and we all know them. It’s kind of nice to have that.”
Source: The Kitsap Sun
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