Preparing for Life’s Early Years Education team recently joined 40 families, Marino College of Education and Coolock Library to celebrate the Storytime Graduation.

Storytime is a wonderful collaboration between Preparing for Life Early Years Education (part of Northside Partnership), Marino Institute of Education, and Dublin City Libraries which encourages parents / caregivers to read more books together at home. It is primarily geared towards pre-school children along with junior and senior infant classes. The programme provides families with tip sheets and strategies to use when reading books with their children at home.

“The Storytime Project has had a hugely positive impact on the participating families,” according to Jelena Simic, Preparing for Life Early Years Education Coordinator. “Taking part in the project encourages families to spend time reading books together, which develops a love of reading. This in turn has proven to have a positive impact on their relationship and establishing positive bedtime routines. It really highlights the importance of reading books from an early age, through books, the children are learning new vocabulary and are exposed to a new world of imagination and fantasy.”

“Creating a new ritual together, for us as parents and the children we looked forward to it, I noticed that bedtime routines became easier too.”

Each participating Early Years Education setting or Primary School designates one member of staff to be the coordinator of Storytime within their organisation. They recruit and support parents for the duration of the project. This year 6 Early Years Services and 11 primary schools took part.

Recruited parents are invited to attend an induction in Marino Institute of Education,  led by Dr. Joan Kiely (Head of Early Childhood Education) to learn the skills involved in ‘Dialogic Storytelling’. This method of reading books with children has been proven to have the most long-lasting benefits to early literacy development.

“Positive for Family Time / Quality Time , positive thing having older siblings being involved.”

The designated Storytime coordinator within each setting is given several ‘book packs’ (one per family) upon leaving the induction day. They then check in with families regularly and swap over books on a weekly basis so that each family is reading one book per week, every night for five weeks.

Families are encouraged to join the library throughout the duration of the project. A group library visit, led by the designated coordinator, is recommended at some point throughout the five week programme.

At the recent graduation ceremony, the families (including children) gathered in Marino Institute of Education to give feedback and to celebrate their success, with parents and children receiving their graduation certificates and rosettes.

This year, we had the pleasure of having Juliette Saumande, published Author and Poet, as our guest speaker for the graduation ceremony. A heartfelt thank you for the wonderful performance, it was inspiring to see such enthusiasm for books and reading!