Pawling Library Children’s Program Receives Grant
By Neena McBaer, Children’s Programming Coordinator
Children’s programming at the Pawling Library has just received a $1,800 grant from the Mid Hudson Library System’s 2018 Outreach Mini-Grant Program. The funding is aimed at improving what resources the department has available for Latinx/Hispanic/English Language Learners whose primary language is Spanish.
Half of the funding will be spent on improving the skills of Bilingual and Spanish-speaking performers, providing programs in Spanish for our families. In addition, another $900 will be spent on adding a new collection to the library–Bilingual Leveled Readers. Our current English leveled reader collection is structured to progressively increase reading difficulty, as children continue to master sentence structure, fluency, and vocabulary. The new Bilingual Leveled Readers will have a similar structure but feature bilingual books. These bilingual selections can be used to progressively teach children to read in Spanish, English, or both. We hope that they will be a helpful resource for parents who speak and read primarily Spanish. Bilingual leveled readers allow parents to draw on the language(s) they already know to support their children while they learn. Since parental reading support and at-home intervention is so important to a child’s reading fluency, providing this resource is yet another way we as a library are looking to help foster literacy in our community. I personally am really excited about adding the bilingual leveled readers to our collection. I love how many different subsets of our community can benefit from their addition. Whether borrowers are looking to increase their own or their children’s Spanish, English, or bilingual literacy, this collection will be supportive.
Expenditures will happen between now and November, and all the programs funded by the grant will take place during our upcoming fall programming cycle. We aim to have the new Bilingual Leveled Readers added to the catalog by the end of the year, if not before. I am currently in the process of looking for bilingual program performers and program leaders.
