Page 982 - Week 03 - Thursday, 22 March 2018
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five years, showing that the community is really responding to the changes our library service is making to keep up with changes in our society.
Our youngest library users are babies. The early years of a child’s life are fundamental to their successful acquisition of language and literacy, and to their success throughout life. Our libraries play a vital role in supporting parents and carers to give our kids the best early start possible.
The very well-known—and often mentioned in this debate this afternoon—giggle and wiggle program is run over 10 sessions each week across library branches to introduce parents and carers to the importance of reading, talking, rhyming and singing with a child, thus ensuring they develop their best possible literacy and language skills early on.
Other programs conducted for children are to further improve their literacy, such as story time, the summer holiday reading challenge and author talks. Increasingly, our library service is supporting children to develop an interest in STEAM—science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics—by offering coding and robotics classes, science workshops and Lego brick clubs. The library also partners with other organisations to support homework clubs directed at those youngsters in the community who might need additional assistance with their reading and learning. It was wonderful to hear Minister Stephen-Smith talk about the partnerships with our child and family centres.
One lovely program which recently commenced in our libraries is the story dogs program. Parents or carers of a child who has difficulty with or a lack of confidence in reading are able to book their child into a session with Dashi the story dog at one of our libraries. Dashi is trained to listen to children read, and he does not, of course, try to prompt the child as an adult human might. Children can read to him without feeling judged and they respond very positively to Dashi and to their reading time together, resulting in more confidence as a reader.
Engaging, celebrating and supporting our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community members is a core activity for Libraries ACT. Last year Libraries ACT appointed an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander liaison officer. His role is to engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and to ensure that the library is meeting their needs. He also works with library staff to make sure that the library collections appropriately reflect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and history and that these items are accessible to all Canberrans.
The ACT is increasingly becoming a more diverse, multilingual society, and our libraries support these communities through collections in 23 languages other than English and the newly established bilingual story times. Of course, bilingual story times are also for English speakers who want to learn or expand their languages other than English. This supports the ACT government’s bilingual agenda.
In a modern world many literacies are needed to thrive. One of them is digital literacy. Our libraries are accredited e-smart libraries, which means that the staff have undergone a rigorous accreditation process to be able to support the community in
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