Easy Early Literacy Spaces, Part 1

This post brought to you by Holly Storck-Post, Youth Services Coordinator at Monroe Public Library.

I started at my current position as Youth Services Coordinator in June, and since then I’ve been adding little early literacy activities and awareness to our children’s section. Some of the things I came up with, a lot of them were suggestions from my amazing staff, and many were inspired by other libraries!

Here is some of what we’re doing. Anything not mine includes a link to the original idea whenever possible!

Early Literacy Tips

This grew out of the idea of posting early literacy tips during storytime. I don’t do our regular in-house storytimes, and I wanted the opportunity to explain why we offer so many different activities. I typed up a TON of tips, some taken straight from ECRR, some adapted from The Early Literacy Kit, and a few more that I specifically wanted to address. I put them in speech bubbles, laminated them, and now I have a backlog that I can pull from every time I change a display or put out a new activity.

Activity Board

The inspiration for this idea originally came from Brooke. I copied her idea, adding in the Spanish language since we have a growing Spanish speaking population and I am working on ways to increase our services to these patrons. At first I just taped it up to the pillar, which quickly failed, so then we added a magnet board in order to have more options.

The next activity at this station was something I came up with for a simple matching game. When I used this game in bilingual storytime, a kid quickly corrected me from “diamond” to “rhombus!”

Play Table

One of my staff who specializes in early literacy saw a post on this blog about a felt table, and suggested that we try it. I covered our table in felt (you need a LOT of tape), and pulled out some of basic felt pieces and wooden props to set out. The kids and families have LOVED this one. One child made us additional props for the animals scene using paper and crayons, and the flowers are getting sorted by color almost daily (on the other days they end up in a big pile on the floor. Those are the days I eat a lot of chocolate).

More ideas for Easy Early Literacy Spaces coming soon!