Check It In, Check It Out: New Spin on PreK Visits
New Orleans Public Library
Innovation Synopsis
The Early Childhood Literacy team created an outreach strategy embedded in a “library curriculum” to increase Preschool student engagement with and understanding of their local library. Storytime accompanied with special time to check in and out books in the classroom culminated to a field trip to a local library to use new library cards. This not only boosted a love of the library among families and educator engagement but also encouraged library card usage and visits to physical spaces. Students who had never experienced going to a library, especially since most schools do not have their own libraries, also had the opportunity to actually visualize it, and share this experience with their families.
Challenge/Opportunity
Previously, we were signing up local preschool classes for library cards and facilitating storytimes across the city, we found that we could not really measure any impact and had a difficult time sustaining relationships with teachers or students and their families. When we did look at library card uses amongst schools we had signed up, we found many went unused. We knew we needed to better organize and streamline our communication with schools; create outcome-oriented goals and benchmarks for our outreach efforts; help encourage library cards usage; and help with physical barriers, like transportation, to get students to the library.
Key Elements of Innovation
The New Orleans Public School system is primarily made of different chartered networks, many of those without school libraries. We decided to focus our outreach efforts on one network per semester or school year, and start communications with school curriculum leaders to facilitate scheduling with the Preschool teachers.
We wanted to ensure each visit was not only early literacy based but also building an understanding of the library as a physical space, how to treat library books, and how library cards are used, culminating in a school field trip to the library. We schedule three visits leading up to the field trip – each with a storytime and dedicated time to “check out” books brought by librarians.
By scheduling a field trip to the library, especially after practicing how to use them leading up to the visit, students were able to physically access the library to utilize library cards.
Achieved Outcomes
Due to this new outreach strategy, we were able to consistently reach 192 students in just one season (4 months), including signing them up for library cards and providing a library visit. In a survey to participating teachers, everyone highly rated the outreach experience for being “extremely valuable” to children in understanding the library, fostering a love of reading, and visiting the library when they wouldn’t have had an opportunity to do so otherwise. While we were not able to report on better library card usage due to students not bringing library cards to the visit (we have changed this going forward and will be handing out cards at the library to ensure they are used), teachers reported new excitement from their students about taking families to the library. However, we have now created learning-outcomes for each outreach session to compare for more outreach opportunities to come, and created feedback surveys to ensure each experience can get better every year.
