Description
- Subject Area: Children’s Literacy
- Type: Workshop
- Length: 7 hours
- Level: training offered to BCC library staff
- Organisers: First5Forever (State Library of Queensland)
- Presenters: Donna Neaves, Megan Scully
- Format: Discussions with multiple group activities throughout the day. Practical session.
- Date: 8/12/2017 Full Day PD
This interactive workshop is designed for library staff that work with children within the ages of 0-5 years. Key topics that were discussed in the session were different delivery methods, importance of play, how to set up and then deliver sessions. This workshop is the practical training component of the F5F training sessions being offered to staff.
This workshop was fairly full on and very practical, which was good because it certainly helped to build my skills and confidence with delivering children’s literacy sessions as my job working in a public library. In smaller groups, we were running a babies, toddler time or storytime session with our peers. I found this very handy because it gives you fresh ideas to take back to your own sessions in the branch. It also got me out of my comfort zone by having to perform in front of my colleagues instead of a group of parent and children, it’s certainly a different experience.
It was also interesting to see how the facilitators incorporated props into their sessions such as scarves and lycra. We had just received some of these props back at the branches, so it was good to learn how to use them within a session and how you could modify the prop for each age group e.g. babies or toddlers.
In the end this was a very enjoyable workshop and a lot of fun and laughter was had between us which always helps in long workshop days.
Participating in this type of workshop is very relevant and the skills learnt are vital to my current public library position. This workshop was a good refresher course for how to conduct sessions as well.
One of the things I really took away from this workshop was how to deliver messages within the books that you select for your session. These messages don’t always have to be heavy hitting and can be simple and subtle. The messages could be directed to kids but are for the parents as well.
It would be handy to be able to participate in similar workshops every year or so to keep my skills fresh and up to date.
