Our summer reading kickoff with T-Bone was a fantastic opening for this year’s summer reading program. Thanks go out to T-Bone who knows how to work the crowd and does a mean rap (o.k., I think the adults enjoyed the rap portion a bit more than the kids – you really had to be there) and to the more than 200 people who attended and were a wonderfully enthusiastic audience. The kids sang, danced and had a rockin’ good time. An extra special thanks to the Moms and Dads who took helped out with the limbo and beach ball songs. I’m not sure the quiet corner will ever be the same. It makes me so glad that the library is no longer the place where everyone says, “SShhhhhh.”
Come to think of it, there are a lot of things different in today’s library than in the library I went to when I was a child. You’d have never found a puppet theater in my hometown library. It’s not a knock on that library, it just wasn’t done then.
My pet peeve as a child was the fact that I was only allowed to take out books the librarian thought were age appropriate. Never mind that I wanted to read a book, it had to be one she considered intended for my grade level. It always bugged me . . . a lot.
As a result I am a huge proponent of letting children read almost any book they want to read. It doesn’t matter if it is above level or below level. What counts is that the child is reading. Scientific research has recently caught up with that line of thinking. It has now been proven that it is time spent reading that improves a child’s reading ability more than anything else.
So, next time you are in the library, tell your children to put on a puppet show, play with the blocks, play a game on the computer and take out any book they want. Remember, any book that a child wants to read is a good one.
