
February 2, 2018 · 0 Comments
By Brian Lockhart
There’s more to literacy than just reading books.
While reading your favourite novel might be a great past time, literacy is also a part of every day life.
Family Literacy Day was celebrated at the Mill Street branch of the Orangeville Public Library last Saturday, January 27. It is a national awareness initiative created by ABC Life Literacy Canada with events held at libraries across the country to raise awareness of the importance of reading and engaging in other literacy related activities as a family.
“Across the country families are engaging in literacy based activities today,” explained Mill Street library program and research coordinator Lauren Tilly. “It’s not just reading a book to your child, which families often do every day, it’s learning how to see the literacy in every day activities. It could be going to the grocery store and reading the grocery list together or it could be playing eye-spy in the car. There’s all sorts of activities that encourage literacy and learning.”
The event included reading and also had some other fun activities for kids that were more hands-on.
“We’ve got more activities. One of the big ones is creating puppets to do story times and create puppets. That’s another way that we’re encouraging literacy,” Ms. Tilly said.
Children’s author Carolyn Morris brought her series of books to the event and held an interactive storytime with the kids.
The Beeton-based author and longtime kindergarten teacher has written books that help teach younger children how to read and encourage them to try bigger words and phrases as they go through her books.
“The ones I’m reading today are the Railfence books. They’re filled with rhyme, rhythm, and repetition, so they’re fun to read to children but they also have the early literacy component to them with the rhyme and rhythm. They have a lot of one-syllable words so they’re fun for children to pick up and read on their own,” Ms. Morris explained.
Each page of the books have a paragraph at the top with descriptive rhyming words across the bottom for the kids to read. The idea, Ms. Morris explained, is that the children will gain confidence reading the short rhyming words then maybe try the longer sentence at the top of the next page.
The event teaches children and parents the importance of literacy and how daily activities can be an important learning tool.