|
It seemed to go by awfully quickly! The families that made up our pilot group of Little Hands, Big Steps participants have already finished circulating their book bags over the 10 week period. Overall, the adult participants reported that the children enjoyed the experience and that they themselves got a lot out of their family reading time with their children. And we were thrilled to see what wonderful care the families took of the books and the bookbags -- no books were damaged or lost from any of the 10 book-bag collections. |
At the launch of LHBS |
|
As the bags made their way from one family to the next, comment forms were included so that KidsLibs could begin to gather data about how the project is working. The concept of family reading, and of sharing books with children too young to read, is not that common here in Kenya and we wanted to know if our program was successfully encouraging youngsters and their caregivers to make reading part of their lives. We learned that books with bright colors and animals were favorites with the children. The adults also liked these books best as they provided a simple way for encouraging the learning of colors, animal names and noises, etc. "These books help children to learn quickly and they make chidren feel happy when they look at those pictures, especially when they are animals," wrote one participant. "It was great! My kid was able to turn pages - something I had never thought about coz I felt he was too young, but I was wrong!," wrote another. One mom felt that not enough of the books in the bag were interesting to her very young child. "My child only liked the Baby's Bath Time beacuse it had pictures she could remember." This will be something to consider as we try to collect books for a second set of bags. Our original idea was to include books for a range of ages and interests since many families have more than one young child at home, but if we are able to find support to expand the program, we might consider having "levels" of book bags for different ages. The early signs are good! As the project moved to a new group of families from another KidsLibs center, we will continue to collect comment forms. We hope the data will enable us to create new groupings of books that the children and families will enjoy even more. The comments will also help us come up with tips and suggestions for our adult readers to make the experience even more enjoyable and productive. |
