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Editor's Notes

• #2: �ݺ�ߣ 1: Good morning everyone and welcome to Turning your Día into a Year: Using a Mini Grant to make a Major Impact with Family Bilingual Programming. I am Jackie Padilla a bilingual Youth Program Specialist from the Orange County Library System in and I’m accompanied today by Noraliz Orengo another bilingual Youth Program Specialist here at the Orlando Public Library, we are the storytellers and presenters of our Día programming. Also with us today is Paola Melillo Manager of the Southeast Branch location, his branch has been awarded one of the 2014 Día Family Bookclub Mini Grants. Finally we have with us Natalie Houston Assistant Manager of the Edgewater Branch and the grant writer for the Orlando Public Library’s submission for the 2013 Día Family Bookclub Mini Grant. Awarded to us in 2013 Noraliz and I will be discussing with you Why we Celebrate Día and programming ideas. Paolo’s branch location will be kicking off their grant programming this summer and he will talk about the benefits and needs of such a grant. Natalie will leave you with grant implementing ideas when it comes to community outreach and partnership she is our grant superstar.
• #3: �ݺ�ߣ 2: Click 1- So I will go ahead and get started. Día is a choice to celebrate diversity in Libraries. This includes exploring various cultures and languages. For us here at the Orange County Library System we use Día to reach our growing Hispanic community. Click 2- Let’s go ahead and define Día de los Niños/ Day of the Children/ From the ALA website Día is defined as a celebration that emphasizes the importance of literacy for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds. We here at the Orange County Library System have a variety of definitions for what celebrates Día. Click 3- Holding a Día de los Niños event or program in various forms allows us to do Día all year round. The Día Bookclub mini grant awarded by ALSC and the Dollar General Literacy Foundation allowed us to do year round programming and create a model in which to follow so that we could continue celebrating Diversity in Action even after the mini grant is done. Click 4, Click 5, Click 6- (photos) Some examples of our celebrations include our annual Día de los Niños event. Many of you are planning your 2014 Día event now for April. This has been our opportunity to invite local authors and local talent to entertain families. Every year our Library System connects our Día celebration with our Celebrate Your World Kids Poetry Contest. Celebrating Día all year round allowed us to expand an already existing Cuentame un Cuento/ Tell Me a Story Bilingual Storytime. This gave us a cultural storytime and celebration every month on a dedicated time and date for our families. Now we celebrate Día all year round using stories, music, crafts, dance and contests throughout the year.
• #4: �ݺ�ߣ 3: When deciding whether or not to celebrate Día I urge you to think of the common goals you share with the nationally recognized movement. Día’s goals are the following: Click 1- Celebrate children and connect them to the world of learning through books, stories and libraries. Click 2- Nurture cognitive and literacy development in ways that honor and embrace a child’s home language and culture. Click 3- Introduce families to community resources that provide opportunities for learning through multiple literacies. Click 4- Recognize and respect culture, heritage and language as powerful tools for strengthening families and communities. If these goals sound familiar to you it’s because they truly are shared goals. Click 5 & Click 6- photos Librarians connect young readers to learning, literacy, resources and culture.
• #5: �ݺ�ߣ 4: If you are like me planning youth programming day in and day out it can leave us all wondering what to do next. The support of the Día website with it’s print outs and toolkits and the excitement of unearthing such diverse programming can lead you to an amazing amount of programming ideas. But before you explore the programming ideas you have to pitch your program and that means finding out the immediate and long term returns of this kind of programming. Click 1- The immediate returns on hosting even one Día cultural celebration are as follows. Click 2- You are creating community interest in your library. Every year we have participants excited to return for the next year and now that we’ve expanded our Día programming to our bilingual storytime, we have families excited to be with us every month not just once a year. Click 3- Another immediate return for your library is you now have the opportunity to highlight Library Resources. With the Día book club mini grant we have been able to purchase CD’s and scarves for our storytimes. We give away books to the families in our program. With these added bonuses we’ve made our program bigger and we have a bigger interest in our Foreign Language Collection and the online resources we offer, especially for language learning and downloadable story books. Click 4- Looking at the longterm returns. We are rounding out our year with the mini grant and soon the Southeast location of our Library System will be beginning their grant term. So far the best longterm return we’ve experienced here at the Orlando Public Library has been the repeat attendance from our program family. Click 5- Over the course of the year that we’ve been doing our Día bookclub we’ve watched families and friendships grow. The families seek us out on days without programs and bring new friends along to show off the program they enjoy so much. Click 6- A second long term return is watching your collection and the interest in a multicultural materials collection grow. Parents ask for more bilingual books to continue the learning at home. They also ask for more programs in various locations. With the Southeast Branch location beginning their Día bookclub shortly we have offered our turn key scripts for bilingual programming to our branch locations for their own community Día celebrations. Click 7- One final long term return I’d like to mention is by Celebrating Día, especially more than once a year, you have now generated great opportunities to create long time library users. This is really the greatest goal in the library world. Inviting families to celebrate their culture or learn about different cultures while engaging in literacy driven activities makes them come back! And repeat usage of the library is what keeps us open. So in support of our communities by offering these culturally diverse programs we now have life long library users.
• #6: �ݺ�ߣ 5: What you see here is promotion for one of our annual Día de los Niños events. As you can see we reached out to a local radio station for our bilingual co host and we brought in Featured Local Mariachi Style Band The Castillo Kids. And the Central Florida Zoo sponsored our Celebrate Your World Poetry Contest. We are a larger library with 15 locations and so yes the beautiful graphic you see was created by our graphic designer Ben Garcia. But the partnerships, performers and donations were not paid for. They were all just community partners who saw great worth in celebrating Diversity in Action. �� **Before I turn over to Noraliz who will be sharing with you our Bilingual Storytime model please let me know if you have any questions so far.
• #7: At the Orlando Public Library we host a bilingual story time for the whole family called Cuentame Un Cuento/Tell Me a Story. Our story time occurs every first Saturday of the month. We introduce Spanish through stories, and rhymes. We like to be inclusive, therefore we mentioned that our program is for those who know Spanish and want to learn and practice their English and for those who know English and want to learn or practice their Spanish. Our program is geared to children up to 5 years of age.
• #8: Here we have a sample outline of the program we present to our patrons. (go through each activity briefly) Introducing words – is an activity in where we have large flash cards with a picture of an animal or item. We ask the children to say what it is and have them repeat it in Spanish. We share tradition songs in both languages such as Los Pollitos Dicen, Itsy Bitsy Spider and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. We present 3 stories. One in all English, one in all Spanish and one in both languages. Sometime we replace a story in book format with a short scholastic video. Flannels are used as bridges and an opportunity to introduce more Spanish. This also helps to keep the children’s attention. At the end of our story time program we include a craft (usually tied with the programs theme). During this time you’ll find the adults and children interacting and often time practicing the language they learned. Mrs. Jackie and I are the bilingual storytellers here and we are by no means fluent “native speaker”. Every story time is a learning experience for us. Being a fluent speaker isn’t needed to host a bilingual story time, just a desire to learn.
• #9: Here are a few tips we use when finding books for our program. -Large, fun & bright illustrations are important. -Introducing concepts they are familiar with such as animals, colors and shapes. -Simple text on each page. Below are some authors we frequently use. Susan Middleton Elya is a great bilingual author who makes it easy for bilingual readers by weaving Spanish vocabulary in her stories. Pat Mora utilizes language appropriate books for building pre-reading skills. English and Spanish texts fill each page with simple and clear sentences. -In the back of the majority of these books there is a GLOSSARY in which it will show you how to pronounce the words. A great tool for every presenter! -If your location has one, feel free to also include another staff member that is more fluent with the language to assist with reading a short Spanish title.
• #10: Here are a few example flannel activities you can share at your story time! We have the wonderful “Five Little Monkey’s Jumping on the bed” – a traditional flannel activities kids love and are familiar with. Julie Fletcher is the author of 1,2,3 Mar! & Jungla de Colores, board books you see displayed on this slide. This collection of board books are filled with large pictures and simple rhymes that you can share with the kids. The books may be too small to read from it we sometimes scan the images to print them on a larger paper and write the words to each image on the back. We’ll have the board book next to us as we present the story. Baby Animals | Pets (English Board Book) – They have simple facts for each animal they mention. They are simple enough for preschoolers to understand. We also scan the images because they are small. Music – we play music as the patrons enter the room, and as they craft. It’s sometime incorporated in the story time. Hot Peas n’ Butter is a great CD that features great songs in a variety of styles, sung in both English and Spanish. Conclusion – Our program has really helped us connect with our community. Families have shared their gratitude towards us for having a program that supports a bilingual environment and Spanish culture. It’s truly a fun a learning experience all around. Any questions?
• #11: The Southeast branch serves a large and vibrant Hispanic community. Within a 1 mile radius 54.5 % of the population is Hispanic and within a five mile radius 41.9% is Hispanic. In Orange County approximately 34% of residents speak a language other than English at home and of this group 69% speak Spanish. In our branch’s zip code, only 67% of Hispanics report themselves as speaking English “very well” or “well.” This cultural reality has created a need and interest for language learning programs as well as family and children’s programs reflecting bilingualism and biculturalism.
• #12: To help address the need for language learning programs for Hispanics we offer several workshops which have high average attendance:
• #13: To help address the need for language learning programs for Hispanics we offer several workshops which have high average attendance:
• #14: Our demographics along with robust workshop/program participation are powerful indicators of the need for a program like the Dia Book Club. The benefit of the club would demonstrating that the Library is a crucial partner in supporting Hispanic parents in their children’s success.
• #15: As part of the grant requirement we drafted a Media Plan and met with our Community Relations Department and our staff videographer. We established three goals: 1 Post three videos to YouTube and receive 100 total views – You can see we’ve far exceeded this goal! 2 Target Hispanic Local Media with at least 10 contacts (If you don’t already this would involve developing a list of Hispanic media contacts in your area) 3 Reach a Spanish Language Audience (since this was one of our goals it was important for us to have all the information available in both English and Spanish) Recorded a promotional video – a commercial to promote the program which was very helpful when talking with potential partners and asking for their support, this does not have to be a professionally made video, you could use a phone or iPad to create a video, or work with your local public access station like the Leesburg Library in Lake County does. Drafted English and Spanish press releases – Paolo helped us with translating even though he was not yet directly involved in the grant, so think about what staff resources you may have outside your department InfoMas a local Spanish-language TV station promote the program in both a short recorded segment and also a live broadcast – we will be contacting them again since they were very interested in the expansion of the program to other locations in our county Although all of these activities do involve staff time they were all free and developing the media plan was just a matter of putting together a plan of action and following through. If you would like to see a copy of our media plan, please email me.
• #16: One of our motivations for presenting bilingual programming is to attract new library users. A key to reaching new library users is getting your message outside the library. Media helps with this but there are also other opportunities. For example, hanging posters at local businesses, such as Dollar General, Cuban bakeries, or grocery stores like Sedanos, and sharing information with Spanish-language churches. Hispanic Business Expo Sedano’s Grocery Store for National Night Out Flyers at the HOLA office – Hispanic Office of Local Assistance for the City or Orlando Grant funding also allowed us to run a print ad in El Sentinel Also included in Conway News Drafted a blog post which the Early Learning Coalition of Orange County posted on their website for preschool and early child care providers as well as parents about our Dia de Los Ninos Celebration and also our bilingual book club for families. The HOLA office also posted to their Facebook page a Spanish-language promotion Also included the receipt of the grant in our Friends of the Library Newsletter – promoting the program internally so that other staff are aware and comfortable promoting it to families is important We also recorded participant stories for a YouTube video which we were able to share with the funders
• #17: There are numerous benefits to working on a grant application even if you do not receive it. Most grants ask you to identify the need in your community and although you may be aware of the need from antidotes or personal experience, finding the data gives you evidence of this need can support future programming efforts. Second, having a plan is really valuable and grants often require you to look hard at what you would need in order to do your project. Plans make projects seem much more doable and often there are many aspects of the project that you can implement without the additional funding. Grants bring attention to projects, it has certainly made bilingual programming more at the forefront of our minds (and of our administrators) and we are beginning to see the results of this additional focus. For example, this summer we will be including Spanish-language titles on our summer reading book lists and also featuring bilingual performers in our summer reading program. We were also able to offer staff training to help non-bilingual staff or bilingual staff who were unfamiliar with presenting a children’s program to gain more experience and we are now beginning to see the dividends of this training in increased offerings of bilingual programming at some of our other locations. So that is really exciting. Where ever you are with your bilingual programming, build on that, through staff development, partnerships, or collections and gradually increase your organizations capacity to offer these types of programs.
• #18: Thank you, please contact us if you have further questions. We would be happy to share more information with you.