Summer Reading programs kick off

"Everything you learn is built upon reading so it's one of the things you really need to work on," said Lana Voss, children's department manager for the Tulsa Central Library.

The Tulsa library system kicked off its children's summer reading program May 15. South Tulsa libraries such as Helmerich Library, 5131 E. 91st St., and Hardesty Library, 6737 S. 85th East Ave., along with satellite libraries in Jenks, Glenpool and Bixby have stepped up the number of programs and events to get kids to the library and involved in reading.

Children's librarians say developing reading skills is still the most fundamental part in a young child's education.

"I think there's a lot of kids that get shuffled through the system and nobody shows them that reading is something that's going to be valuable to them in their life," Kelly Jennings said.

Jennings is the children's coordinator of the Tulsa City-County Library. She helped develop the ideas behind this year's summer reading program, "Read for the Gold Down Under."

The program plays off of the Summer Olympics held in Australia. Children are awarded a medal and enter drawings to win several prizes ranging from computers to boomerangs to mountain bikes if they read eight books and visit the library four times by June 26.

Jennings said that actual visits to the library have become more important to the program because it fosters more reading than just checking out all of the books at once.

"We find the kids read a lot more books than required of them if they make more visits," Jennings said.

More visits also gives children more chances to find something they are really interested in reading, which is a key component in getting a child to enjoy reading.

"The key to them learning to read is choosing their own books," Jennings said. "If you zero in on your child's interests and find books to match those interests, they're going to want to read."

If kids can make it to the library, chances are they will find an interest. Evidence of that lie in the fact that more than 510,000 children's books were checked out through the library system last year.

This year, the library system is trying to get more kids to the library by providing more programs in general and by adding programs tailored toward day care centers.

Jennings said the library system has added specific events to the Helmerich Library, along with Jenks and Bixby Libraries so that day-care centers in those areas will have easy access to programs that were only offered at the central and regional libraries in the past.

While some of these events will be exclusive to child-care centers, those same events and performers will be performing for the rest of the public on different days as well. Some of the bigger children's events include visits from the local magician "Bradini," visits from Safari Steve, who makes balloon animals, and visits from several local storytellers.

While the libraries have made an outreach to child-care centers, Jennings still said that it is most important that parents develop children's reading skills by showing them that reading is important.

"I don't think parents realize that they are their child's first teacher when it comes to reading," Jennings said.

Voss said she has visited kindergarten classes where she could tell which children had parents who encouraged learning to read. In some of these classes, some children still did not know where the front of the book was.

"That just shows you that those parents haven't read to the child," Voss said.

The summer reading program allows for parents to read to younger children because it encourages them to learn to read sooner and develops other important skills.

"In reading to kids at an early age, they learn patterns of language and sounds and vocabulary. Those are all pre-reading skills that you need," Voss said.

Not to mention reading to a child is time well spent together. As Jennings points out, this may be one of the reasons books stay around in this new age of technology.