William B. Ogden Library Hosts Book Talk for Kids and Parents
Apr 14 2010
By Glenn Graves
WALTON — A program developed to get parents and children reading together, and talking sharing their ideas about what they’ve read, concluded at the William B. Ogden Free Library this past Wednesday. Ten families participated, including a couple of fathers and a couple of grandparents, in the six-week series designed to get children between the ages of nine and 11 involved in learning and the pleasure of reading.
The program, “Together – Book Talk for Kids and Parents,” is sponsored by the New York Council for the Humanities with $1,000 grants to participating libraries. Ogden Librarian Sally Cranston applied for one of the grants and the program began on March 3, with the families reading a picture book titled, The Lotus Seed. In addition to paying for the books and a co-facilitator, to work alongside Cranston, the grant also provided a babysitter for additional family members not yet old enough to participate in the reading and a weekly dinner for all.
Every Wednesday for six weeks, the families joined together at the library and read a selected book, which alternated between picture books and chapter books. From 6:30-8 p.m., the group read aloud and then dis-cussed the text.
When the group met on March 31, the selected book was The Girl who Loved Wild Horses, and a program director from the Council for the Humanities, Erika Halstead, attended. Cranston and the co-facilitator, Brynne Hoover, who is a reading teacher at the George F. Mack Middle School in Walton, led the reading and then prompted the children, and their parents and grandparents, to discuss the story of the Native American girl who tends her tribe’s horses and eventually grows to love them so much she joins the freed herd. The book’s theme led the children to discuss the animals in their lives and their love for them and to select the illustration that they felt most represented the word and image of freedom.
Cranston said she was pleased with the level of participation, and was especially pleased with the interest the adults took in the readings and discussions. She said that the library has many younger children in and out throughout the day, but when children get to be in the fourth or fifth grade, “We start to see them losing interest in reading and we’d like to help them regain that interest.”
Halstead said the program was developed for this age group because “This is when they stop reading solely for fun and begin reading for their schoolwork. We want them to continue to have an interest in reading for fun. We’re hoping this will provide the spark that will make them lifetime readers.”
