More children than ever are crawling, toddling, or running past the circulation desk and into the Hillsdale Community Library this year.
The Hillsdale County Community Foundation awarded the library a grant for more than $4,500 on Jan. 3 to fund the library’s early literacy support efforts that continue to draw in more kids and families. The foundation’s Director of Community Engagement Amber Yoder said the organization has given money to the library before, but it has never specifically funded early reading initiatives.
“The Hillsdale County Community Foundation believes that literacy is an important piece of the success and wellbeing of our county’s residents and the community as a whole,” Yoder said. “Encouraging and fostering a love of language, reading, and writing from an early age is vital to our children.”
Hillsdale Community Library Director Mary Hill said the library purchased educational toys that will help children develop the skills they need before they learn to read. These toys include a play kitchen, a light table, a water table, trucks, a dollhouse, and many, many Legos.
“Children learn through dexterity, through finger play. Things like that, like hand-eye coordination, encourage them. They are precursors to learning to read,” Hill said. “The basic things you learn when you’re little, you carry those things with you your whole life.”
A child learns to share and practices her fine motor skills when she picks up a plastic head of broccoli at the library’s toy kitchen and hands it to a friend. As exciting as the toys are to the children, the playroom and the education it offers is just as enthralling to parents.
“We have seen a huge increase in our traffic as far as our community,” the library’s Children and Teen Services Coordinator Vickie Lee said. “We’re usually quite busy anyways but we’ve seen a huge increase in our traffic since we started publicizing this.”
Lee said the children have astounded her with what they can imagine and create. She’s seen little tikes stack towers reaching as high as their little hands can touch. She’s witnessed older children, especially those who attend the library’s after school program, click Legos together to craft intricate, complicated structures.
“Any time you can encourage a kid to play and interact with other kids, you stimulate their mind and their imaginations and help them grow. That is what we’re after,” Lee said.
The early literacy program does not end with playtime, however. The toys prepare children for the next step: reading.
“When they’re playing with the toys, they’re surrounded by books. They do show an interest in the books once they’re in there,” Lee said. “Hopefully we’ll graduate them from the early play and get them comprehending books.”