Since 1945, the Children’s Book Council of Australia has run Children’s Book Week. This year, from 19-25 August, children around Australia will be celebrating books and a love of reading in schools, libraries and community organisations. Parents will – no doubt – be honing their book week costume-making skills. The Footpath Library believes wholeheartedly that a love of reading starts with children at a young age, and sets them up for success.
Here’s an example of how our Melbourne Programs Manager’s son, Dash, kept up his reading during COVID.
Dash (8) loves to read and is a regular at the Yarra Libraries. During COVID, when the library was closed, he was lucky to have shelves of books at home. The neighbours’ kids on the street – who also love to read – would swap and share books.
Dash (8) loves to read and is a regular at the Yarra Libraries. During COVID, when the library was closed, he was lucky to have shelves of books at home. The neighbours’ kids on the street – who also love to read – would swap and share books.
“The Yarra Street library had a great system, you sent your neighbours a note in their letterbox asking for books that included a certain theme, for example, transport or farm animals. The neighbour’s children would then gather five books they had at home that had that theme and write a library card for each book that was to be loaned out plus a list of those who they were lending the books to,” explained Katrina, Dash’s mum.
The list would get put in a cloth bag and delivered to the door of the house that requested the books. The list helped the children to know which books they borrowed and where to return them once they’d been read.
The lenders would keep the library cards for the books on file, so they would know who they had loaned them to and could check them back in when the five books were returned.
“This COVID activity was a real winner as it encouraged reading, writing, loaning books, and categorising them, plus the kids got creative with requests and it was always a lovely surprise to find the note in the letterbox or a bag of new books to read on the doorstep,” said Katrina. “It was also a history lesson as books don’t have library cards at the back these days, so it was nice teaching kids how we used to check books out many years ago.”
