Early literacy is the new push at King County libraries throughout the system. The idea, according to Carol Fick, children’s librarian at Woodinville Library, is to capitalize on all the recent “baby brain” research, which is producing new data supporting the fact that infants begin to learn as early as birth.

“Early literacy is what children need to know about reading and writing before they can actually read and write,” explains Fick, “and if young children develop the necessary skills early on, then later, reading will be easier for them.”

To help promote early literacy, King County libraries are providing more training in this area for parents and caregivers. In addition to special workshops and other related programs, which are being held at most of the libraries in the system, new ready-to-read early literacy modules have been installed in six locations.

Woodinville Library was chosen as one of the sites to pilot the modules. “These are being tested to see if they’re going to eventually be placed in other libraries,” says Fick. “They were developed as a way to get young children and their parents involved in early literacy activities.”

The three five-foot multi-colored units in the children’s area of Woodinville Library look like a giant jigsaw puzzle. They attract curious visitors immediately and on closer inspection they reveal a variety of hands-on manipulatives imbedded down low (to make them accessible to young children) into the sides of the units. Each manipulative involves activities that young kids can do and provides a list of ways for parents to interact with their children in the process.

“The six activity stations correspond to the six essential early literacy skills,” says Fick, “which are: print awareness, print motivation, vocabulary, narrative skills, letter knowledge and phonological awareness. These are the skills children need to master before they can read.”

Fick explains that with print awareness, the focus is on getting the child to notice print and understand how to handle a book and how to follow words on a page. With print motivation, the idea is to get a child interested in books and motivated to explore them. Vocabulary involves knowing the names of things, and narrative skills deal with being able to describe these things to others, as well as being able to understand and tell stories.

In letter awareness, the aim is to learn that letters are different from each other and that each letter has a name and specific sounds that go along with it. And phonological awareness stresses the ability to hear and play with the smaller sounds within words.

At one of the module’s stations, children can manipulate wooden eggs with letters on them to create three letter words. At another, there’s a color wheel to identify the names of primary colors, along with an opportunity to blend the colors and create new hues. Other stations encourage kids to make up their own stories using wooden shapes with pictures. They can also match big and little letters using wooden spinners or match various objects by color, number, size, shape and even location. Part of each module unit has a magnetic area where young visitors can hang letter magnets to practice letter recognition or to make words.

At each station, suggestions are given parents or caregivers on how to reinforce and expand on the activities, along with some books (conveniently placed in attached holders) they can read to their children that tie in with the various essential skills.

“The idea is to engage the parents as well as the kids,” comments Fick. “While the children are touching, pulling, spinning and playing with the manipulatives, their parents can be talking and asking questions about what they’re doing. And to give them ideas about what they can talk about or discuss, we’ve provided some suggestions. The books are there so that people don’t have to hunt them down on the shelves. They can basically seize the moment and take the opportunity to read to their kids.”

The module units conveniently offer built-in places to cozy up and read, although Fick admits that they are not used as much as she had expected.

The same goes for the module activity stations overall. “They look really neat and they seem to attract kids to the area, but we just haven’t seen as much use out of them as we thought there would be from both children and their parents,” comments Fick. “The kids will come over and play with some of the stuff, but the parents aren’t really engaged.”

The structure has increased the noise level at times in the library, which according to Fick, has caused some complaints from patrons, who don’t want the library to turn into a play area. “We have to be able to balance the needs of all our patrons,” she remarks.

“Basically, the noise is really only in one area and so we direct people to other parts of the library if they desire a quiet place to read or work.”

Only time will tell if the modules will be able to meet the early literacy objectives, but before that can be determined, Fisk feels that an evaluation tool must be created.

She adds, “We need specific ways we can use to determine if the objectives are being met. Until then, we would only be guessing.” When it comes down to early literacy, Fick’s advice to parents and caregivers is simple: “Read aloud with your child everyday. That is the single most important thing you can do to help your child get ready to read.”