A colorful array of backpacks waits at the Berryville Public Library to be picked up and taken on a family adventure. Destination: home. The adventure? It’s inside the pack, and there might be more than one.
These aren’t ordinary backpacks. Each is loaded with books, games, learning challenges, a craft to make and keep, and things to share. Most important, each is an opportunity for a family to journey together to another world, a different culture, a new way of thinking or a fun place to hang out.
The backpacks come in categories by reading age and are tailored to that group. The green Storytime packs, for instance, are for the new reader, pre-reader and children who still like to be read to. Each pack is built on a theme such as ABCs, zoo animals or colors, and contains four books, an activity or finger play, a craft kit for four, a DVD or CD based on the theme, and a newsletter.
The program was initially conceived by Library Director Julie Hall and her staff as Storytime Backpacks. “It started as a family literacy project – reading together at home and talking about books on your own time at your own place,” Hall explained.
The idea slowly expanded into the current program through a partnership between the library and the Berryville public school system in a Read 2 Succeed program funded by the Carroll County Community Foundation. The 37 backpacks available to be checked out along with Storytime now cover four targeted reading levels.
The blue, or Book Nut pack, is for emerging readers and contains four copies of the same book so a family can read along or take turns, craft kits for four, an activity or game, task cards with read-talk-play-do activities and a card for rating by the family. The orange, or Family/Tweens pack, serves as sort of a Family Book Club and contains all of the above plus longer books and a family discussion and decision card.
Purple backpacks contain either Ola Storytime or Ola Book Nut material in both English and Spanish, an activity promoting bilingual language use, flash cards, craft kits, simple rhymes, and four bi-lingual books, some with side-by-side texts.
So, how can taking home a backpack affect a family’s future?
A 2017 publication by the Arkansas State Legislature, Moving the Needle on Grade-Level Reading in Arkansas, noted: “In Arkansas, only about half of kindergarten students are considered ready for school when they arrive in the classroom, which makes them less likely to read on grade level by the end of third grade.” And, “Children from low income backgrounds hear 30 million fewer words by age three than their peers from higher income families.”
And why that matters has been summed up in countless studies showing the connection between reading comprehension skills and socioeconomic level, as well as some alarming statistics on the percentage of students who are unable to distinguish between true and false information. The problem is comprehension.
In the study, “Patterns of Literacy among U.S. students” published in The Future of Children by the Sandford Center for Education Policy, the authors “show that almost all U.S. students can ‘read’ by third grade, if reading is defined as proficiency in basic word-reading skills. But reading for comprehension—integrating background knowledge and contextual information to make sense of a text—requires a set of knowledge-based competencies in addition to word-reading skills. By the standards used in various large-scale literacy assessments, only about a third of U.S. students in middle school possess the knowledge-based competencies to ‘read’ in this more comprehensive sense.”
It’s a problem to be solved, and help is definitely on the way in those colorful backpacks full of diverse supplemental material that pairs with the book, provides context and reference, invites discussion and fosters deeper understanding of what’s being read.
According to Hall, response has been enthusiastic with 126 backpacks checked out between June and December last year. “Our hope is to bring families into the library to discover all the available resources,” Hall said, “to find out it’s not just about books.”
In Berryville only, elementary or intermediate students get a lanyard stamped at the library when they complete a backpack. After their fourth stamp, the school awards the student a $20 gift card to a local eatery as part of the grant program. With schools making their way through the pandemic, the backpack program is helping a child’s education continue outside of school all year long – and educating some parents too.
Backpacks can be checked out from the Berryville library for three weeks, just like a book, with a valid Carroll and Madison County system library card. They must come back with all contents except for the craft kits and newsletter, which are the borrowers to keep.
All six libraries in the Carroll-Madison group have a reading program. Explore them all at camals.org