The city of Oxford spokeswoman, Lorie Denton, shared that an innovative new toolkit offered at the Oxford Public Library is providing librarians with strategies to help families provide a firm foundation for children to succeed in school and in life.
Oxford Public Library is one of 88 public libraries throughout the state participating in Reimagining School Readiness, a program that features research-backed resources for parents or caregivers that profoundly bolsters the preliteracy skills underlying school readiness for children from birth to age 8.
The Reimagining School Readiness (RSR) Toolkit was developed by the Bay Area Discovery Museum with support from the California State Library and the Pacific Library Partnership. The Alabama Public Library Service (APLS) was awarded a grant to train the state’s public libraries on RSR principles including quality adult-child interactions, social skills, math and science learning, emotional learning, and stress management.
“Providing children with high-quality learning experiences is a sound investment in Alabama’s future,” said Amy Henderson, Oxford Public Library Director. “The program places a strong emphasis on key aspects of early childhood development and empowers librarians to support children and families through fun, everyday activities that can happen at the library or at home.”
The toolkit’s resources—including implementation tips and strategies for librarians, and take-home activities for families—are based on research that views school readiness as a robust developmental process over the first eight years of a child’s life. Program research asserts that all children are capable of developing the skills they need if the adults in their lives provide developmentally appropriate and rich experiences to boost learning and cognitive development.
The RSR Toolkit includes fliers, bookmarks, posters, and flashcards that feature easy, everyday activities and conversation starters for families to share to build quality interactions that shape children’s thinking skills. APLS developed a companion instructional kit for all participating libraries that includes activities on ten different topics with books and educational toys that fortify the key findings of the study leading to RSR’s development.
The Oxford Public Library already has a strong children’s department that provides resources and encouragement for parents to prepare our community’s children for school achievement. Library staff who are knowledgeable about early childhood development and the role reading and education play in development are an important support for parents who want their children to be successful upon entering school and throughout their education. Oxford has such library staff, and this program will supplement their capabilities to help the families in our community.
Also now until May 10, 2022 Springer Nature is pleased to announce the availability of well over ten thousand eBooks from the year 2021 to over 400 institutions compromising the Alabama Virtual Library (AVL). Access to these eBooks will be open until May 10, 2022 with further access to be negotiated jointly by Springer Nature and the AVL. All access is via IP recognition with your affiliated institution, which includes public and private schools, colleges and universities in Alabama.
The collection on trial includes scholarly books, conference proceedings, textbooks, contributed volumes and shorter books known as briefs. This is the bulk of English language published eBooks for the year 2021 from the world’s largest eBook publisher, Springer Nature.
Subjects in this collection embrace every discipline that might be taught at a high school, college or university, including psychology, biology, engineering, computer science, history, social sciences, law and criminology, education, energy, business and management, environmental science, mathematics and statistics, chemistry, physics, robotics, political science, and medicine. These eBooks are all peer reviewed and available for download without digital rights management restrictions with one click. They can be read on any device of choice that can display a .PDF or EPUB file. No requirement to be connected to Wi-Fi is necessary to read these eBooks once they are downloaded.
This is a chance for Alabama to connect with the most prolific and prestigious scholarly eBook publisher in the world and enjoy reading in all scholarly subject areas.
Springer Nature eBooks can be accessed from the E-Books Resources page on AVL. Please note: In order to access Springer Nature eBooks, users will need to access the trial from their local public library or their educational institution.
Tell your friends. Tell your teachers. But remember, the download ability will only be there until Tuesday May 10, so start reading today!
The AVL Council would like your feedback on the Springer Nature eBooks trial! If you would like to provide feedback on the trial, please use the Springer Nature eBooks Trial feedback form.
If you have any questions please contact: Amy Henderson – Oxford Public Library Director and Alabama Virtual Library State Council Chair (256) 831-1750 ext 8 or email at amy.henderson@oxfordal.gov
