Last Friday was Family Literacy Day.
To mark the occasion the Drayton Valley Municipal Library hosted a workshop for preschoolers.
Since 1999 ABC Life Literacy Canada has declared January 27th to be Family Literacy Day. It’s a day to encourage all members of the family to get involved in teaching reading and writing skills to children.
Each year, ABC chooses a theme. This year the theme was Celebrate Your Heritage.
Verna Wicks, the youth programmer at the library, says this year was the first indoor gathering for the day since Covid began. In the past few years, it has either been held virtually or in outdoor spaces.
She says she approached several organizations for help, including Drayton Valley and District Community Learning, the Multicultural Society, the Genealogical Society and the Friends of the Drayton Valley Library. With their help, and the help of volunteers from the Family Resource Network and some Elders from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, they were able to give a well rounded event.
“Whatever the theme is, I try to figure out how literacy can fit with it,” says Wicks.
Wicks says the hope was to have pre-schoolers, parents and maybe some siblings come down to the event. By having parents attend, the pre-schoolers were able to learn something about their heritage while participating in the literacy projects.
“The goal was to expose young people to literacy in various languages, and acknowledge that we don’t all have the same heritage even when it comes to our language.”
In order to embrace the theme, Wicks focussed on different languages that are spoken. She had several stations set up where attendees could see Cree symbols, or learn words for items in different languages.
“There were a few different ways to do things even if you don’t know another language, so you could still have fun while being exposed to another language,” she says.
There were eight different stations for participants. These included a Say Hello station, I Spy, Many Maps, Storytime, Flag Tree, Family Tree, Alphabet Sort, and the Language Library.
“I had 24 languages represented there,” says Wicks.
Wicks says she brought in books from other libraries because the local library doesn’t carry books with other languages. Some of the books brought in were for adults as well, and Wicks says they are available to anyone with a library card through the TracPac system.
At the beginning, everyone received a passport to fill out at each station. When they were finished, they turned them in to Wicks, who will draw a winner to receive a bilingual book.
Even though the event is concluded, Wicks says people can still come down to the library to see the Flag Tree and check out some of the alphabets and syllabics Wicks had 3D printed for the event.
