You know you’re a children’s librarian when …
…you clean out your office desk for the final time and your personal possessions consist of a teddy bear, a tambourine, frog and duck finger puppets, a ukulele, a storytime bell, and similar treasures. 
What’s your most curious programming possession?
(Next month: thoughts on moving to a new library!)
Photo credit: L
Taylor
The post You know you’re a children’s librarian when … appeared first on ALSC Blog.
Talking is Teaching: Talk Read Sing, a campaign of Too Small to Fail, offers libraries tools for high-exposure partnerships in early literacy, and a clear alignment with Every Child Ready to Read through its targeted parent engagement strategies to close the 30 million word gap.
As an advertising campaign to parents, it works on the evidence that organized drives to change behavior are most effective when they use “nudges” to remind people to make small changes in their daily routines. The campaign asks communities to organize its trusted messengers (us!) to work together, putting that consistent message “Talk Read Sing” in front of parents throughout their day, and throughout their city. And it gives us plenty of tools to do it.
Oakland CA was the kickoff city for Talk Read Sing last summer. Billboards on freeways and bus shelters still invite parents, in English and Spanish, to talk with their children through playful slogans: “Let’s talk about the bus” or “Let’s talk about the weather.” Bibs and towels distributed in our libraries and elsewhere: “Let’s talk about food” and “Let’s talk about bath time.” The branding and creative assets produced by the campaign are available to libraries and other organizations who register at Too Small to Fail’s Community site.
A Talk Read Sing enthusiast at the Elmhurst Branch of the Oakland Public Library (photo courtesy of the author)
Here, the coordinated distribution of free materials was managed by First 5 Alameda County, in partnership with many organizations (including OPL) involved in Oakland Reads 2020, a community in the National Campaign for Grade Level Reading. The Talk Read Sing campaign is a natural strategy for school readiness, and works seamlessly within Grade Level Reading campaigns.
Our rollout meetings provided a perfect opportunity for me to share our own OPL “Talk Sing Read Write Play” brochures, which we developed from the ECRR2 curriculum. Despite the fact that ECRR2 promotes two additional elements, the message is clearly the same, and partners were thrilled to have local materials to weave into the campaign. Boom: our library brochures went city wide.
If you have a Grade Level Reading Community or a functioning literacy collation, you have the perfect network to build a Talk Read Sing campaign in your community. Introduce yourself as a partner who can help engage parents around teaching behaviors that will help everyone meet common goals for early literacy. And if you don’t have such a network yet, this campaign is the perfect carrot to get one going. See SPFL’s Christy Estrovitz’s presentation “Inspired Collaborations” for some tips.
For the public overview of the campaign, including free resources: http://talkingisteaching.org/
For the community campaigning materials, register at: http://toosmall.org/community
And find out more at ALA Annual, Sunday June 28 from 1-2pm, at Babies Need Words Every Day: Bridging the Word Gap as a Community
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Our guest blogger today is Nina Lindsay, Children’s Services Coordinator at the Oakland Public Library, CA, who talks, reads, and—yes!—sings, every day.
The post Every Child Ready to… Talk Read Sing!: Partnership in Action appeared first on ALSC Blog.
…you clean out your office desk for the final time and your personal possessions consist of a teddy bear, a tambourine, frog and duck finger puppets, a ukulele, a storytime bell, and similar treasures. 
