So just wanted to share a success story or two success stories really. I have been struggling with borrowing and browsing time with Kindergarten as I am in the library space by myself and they do not come with a support person. I have tried various things with various degrees of success. One that was helpful was laying a selection of books out on the table prior to them arriving and they browse from there. We are working our way through the picture books by alphabet. This has the added advantage of it being really easy to re-shelve the books when they come back. Each letter also gets a complete re-shelving as part of the process as most letters are half or completely cleaned out.
This is not the real success story though, the story happening in the picture is. 3 weeks ago I had some year 4/5 students split as we could not get a casual. They came with Kindergarten and I used them as a distraction and I thought, what if they read stories for the kinders while I got them to borrow a few at a time. It worked quite well. Fast forward to today. I now have 3 senior classes willing to provide students for my ‘read to the kinders’ program. My seniors are introduced as ‘Picture book reading experts’.
The positives for this goes far beyond making borrowing time easier. Kindergarten students get to hear stories read to them (and they were very engaged – photo was not staged!). My ‘special guests’ were so excited to be visiting the library, they get to select the picture books they read and I could hear them discuss and evaluate their choices (student 1: oh, I think this one has too many words, Student 2: yeah, but the pictures are really bright and it’s a good story), they got to practice their oral reading and leadership skills and the boost to their reading confidence was visible.
To have students literally jumping up and down as they see the kinders coming because they are so excited to read out loud was a very happy moment as a librarian.
I stumbled upon this post as I browsed my fellow Students blogs – what a lovely idea! so simple, but providing so many benefits for you and all the students. I loved reading about it 🙂