With more than 75,000 preschool children, Calgary is a city that sees thousands of children cared for in daycares every day. Significant research highlights that reading, learning, and school success are positively impacted when caregivers model behaviours and provide early instruction, information, and intervention to children. Armed with that research, Library staff share Talk, Sing, Read, Write, and PLAY! early literacy principles with the available audience of thousands of toddlers, preschoolers and their daycare caregivers. Library Month at Your Daycare strengthens the early literacy foundation for thousands of Calgary’s youngest citizens and provides daycare staff with additional early literacy tools.

Creating a city of engaged, lifelong readers is at the heart of the four weekly visits Library staff make to daycares over the course of a month. During each visit, children participate in a delightful 30-minute storytime with Library staff, complete with songs, rhymes, and fingerplays. The same songs and rhymes are used each week, giving children and daycare staff the opportunity to learn them. Thanks to Rotary, Library picturebooks are provided for the month. Early literacy resource materials and Library cards are provided for daycare staff, and are also sent home to parents across the city each week.

Over one hundred eighty daycare classes in 2015 experienced Library Month at Your Daycare, representing over 720 visits to individual daycares. On average, 22 children participated at each visit, along with their daycare providers. Feedback, collected through journals, has been overwhelmingly positive. Children are reading more, remembering and repeating rhymes and songs, and taking books home thanks to Library Month at Your Daycare. Parents shared that their children are now more aware of the Library and get excited about stories and books. Daycare providers have developed enhanced storytime practices and continue to use the early literacy resources provided. And we’re just getting started!