Early Literacy and Learning Spaces

Early Literacy and Learning Spaces
Presented at PLA 2012 by Kathleen Reif, Elaine Meyers, Amanda Ellington, Jill Bickford, and Maren Ostergard

Create an early literacy environment emphasizing all 5 practices of Every Child Ready to Read 2. Use areas in the library to create the spaces. Use shelves, table tops, walls, and so on. Create spaces for the community to learn interactively and informally about early literacy and what adults and children can do together to teach the skills. Children are ready to learn from birth, but they need our help.
As you set up the learning areas, try to see the spaces from a child’s eye view. Displays should be attractive and well organized. The first principle of design is to create an appealing environment. Keep in mind that your signage and graphics will create first impressions. What tells the patron that this is an early childhood space? Use a full spectrum of colors. Young children don’t like explosively primary colors. Have displays that children can crawl to and pull up to with easily accessible materials. It should be comfortable. Make the spaces interactive to encourage adult-child participation. Any activity that encourages talking between adult and child engages one of the ECRR practices—talking, which supports the skils of vocabulary and narrative skills, among others. Consider opening the storytime room when there are no programs. Create areas for singing with access to musical instruments. Display words to popular children’s songs in that area and also in the bathroom near the changing table. Put up a puppet stage to encourage play, another practice of ECRR. Create areas where children can write or scribble or do other craft activities, such as lacing—they all support the ECRR practice of writing. Magnet or felt boards along with letters, shapes, story characters, animals, and so on allow children to experience playing, talking, and writing and help develop narrative skills and letter knowledge, among other ECRR skills. Look at what children’s museums offer and try to adapt some of their activities to the library. Create play kits that parents and children can use for a variety of play activities. Create 5 different spaces to coincide with the 5 practices. Use a theme that changes monthly to keep the displays and activities fresh. A playhouse, dollhouse, train table, dress up clothes, and so on all encourage playing, another ECRR practice. Puzzles, blocks, and legos are popular and also lend well to adult-child interaction and play. One library uses ‘flight bags’, which are bags with a book and related activities and manipulatives for use in the library. Alphabet Bags contains things that all start with the same letter. Create matching games with placemats and silverware—match colors or shapes. If you have a storytime rug, you can make matching cards that children can place on the objects, colors or letters around the rug. You might place numbered decals on the floor. Children will step on them and count on their way to the children’s area. Put mirrors at a low level at the check-out desk. Picture an emotion next to the mirror to encourage children to mimic that emotion—and practice vocabulary. Other activities that have been successful include: matching things that belong together, matching an object with its first letter, matching pictures that rhyme. Have handouts that explain about the learning spaces and offer tips for at home activities that support early literacy.
Library systems with multiple locations should consider making learning modules that can rotate at regular intervals from place to place.
These learning centers can be created using minimal space. Use what you have—table tops, shelves, walls, the floor and the storytime room. If possible, have a dedicated computer in the storytime room for online stories. Educate staff about talking with parents and encouraging play and how it helps develop early literacy. Consider adding activities for upper elementary age, such as chess sets and other games.
Another reason staff need to understand the importance of these centers is because all staff will be involved in the clean-up. Disinfecting at the end of the day is easy. Use a 3:1 bleach solution in a spray bottle and spray down the toys every night. Just let them dry overnight.
Go to the PLA website, 2012 conference handouts, to see pictures of different learning spaces various libraries have created: : http://placonference.org/programs and look for handouts from the session on Thursday, March 15, Early Literacy and Learning Spaces: An ECRR Workshop.