Considering that I found this week's book, Literacy in American Lives, to be one of the driest books I've read in a long time, and really couldn't find any pieces that were terribly relatable to my personal life, I want to tell a little story about a little girl's introduction to literacy (well, to the library). Note: this little girl is completely fictional, but she was the character used in our Book Cart Drill Team performance at the Wisconsin Library Association convention yesterday, and the story I'm about to tell is the story that we told in our performance.
Cue music: Star Wars. The scene: four librarians, checking their books to make sure that everything is in the right place. Enter: little girl, approximately age 8. Librarians realize that this is their chance to introduce a little girl to the library and books of all sorts.
Music change: Superman. Librarian 1 hands little girl a book on superheroes and puts a cape on her. Little girl flies like Superman (belly-surfs on a book cart) around the library with the librarians watching over her. She has discovered stories about superheroes.
Music change: E.T. Librarian 2 hands little girl a book about aliens and puts a blanket over her head, like E.T. wore in the movie. Librarians fly girl around the library like E.T. riding a bike. Little girl discovers story about aliens.
Music change: Jurassic Park. Librarian 3 hands little girl a book about dinosaurs. As little girl reads book, librarians swirl around her in fantastic pinwheels. Little girl becomes a dinosaur (puts on a dinosaur mask) and scares the librarians.
Music change: Hook. Librarian 4 hands little girl Peter Pan and sprinkles her with fairy dust. Little girl "sails" around the library on a book cart and sword-fights with librarians.
Music change: typical John Williams finale. Librarians wave good-bye to little girl, who takes her books home with her. Upon her exit, librarians rush to put on costumes and play for a little while longer.
Well, now that I've given a brief narrative of our championship-winning performance at last night's WLA (see the video at the bottom of this post), it's time to tie it in to libraries and literacy. I joked as we were preparing this performance that it's every children's librarian's fantasy, to take a child on a whirlwind adventure in the library, to help them learn to love books and the stories contained within. And really, if our librarians could take children on these true adventures, I have a feeling that children would much more easily develop a love of reading, too. Unfortunately, the problem lies in the fact that many children don't quite have the literacy skills to read books very quickly, and as such they get frustrated with books much sooner than they discover the wonder and adventure contained within. I don't offer any suggestions here of how to improve literacy among children (if I had a solution, I would already be very rich), but neither does Deborah Brandt. She's only exploring how people achieved literacy, and I believe this performance represents an event that would stand out in any child's mind about how they acquired literacy. If libraries helped a child act out what they're reading, that child would almost certainly remember the activity (especially if it involved flying, as our performance did).
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