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City toddlers learning to read will have more materials to choose from, thanks to a city-sponsored distribution of books.
At 6 p.m. Tuesday evening, an upstairs room at the Connecticut Children’s Museum on Wall Street was filled with neat stacks of 1,555 picture books. Volunteers started pouring in, and pretty soon those books were being sorted out into dozens of red paper bags, bound for preschool and daycare rooms all across the city.
It was the third annual book bag packing party, an event put on by the New Haven Early Childhood Council. Sandy Malmquist, council member and director of the Connecticut Children’s Museum, said that the 1,555 books — including many in Spanish and English — were purchased with money given by the Board of Aldermen and the mayor’s office. Every preschool and infant/toddler classroom in the city will receive a bag of seven or 10 books respectively, Malmquist said.
The bag-packing volunteers included a number of women who work in the classrooms that will receive the books.
Tamara Collins (at left in top photo), of the Yale-New Haven Hospital Daycare, was packing a bag of books to read to children from three months to three years old. She chose from books like “Wee Willie Winkie,” and “I’m A Dingle-Dangle Scarecrow.” The classic “Caps For Sale” was stacked nearby.
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Linda Monton (pictured), of the United Community Nursery School, said books are a vital part of early childhood education. In addition to language skills, the content of a book like “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” can teach tots hand-eye coordination and singing and rhyming. “Oh, so many things,” she said.
Early exposure to books can also instill a love of the written word, rather than a love of TV and videos, Monton said.
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Mayor John DeStefano stopped by to peruse some books. He tied the book distribution effort to the city’s school reform agenda. It’s “really important in the sense of enabling us to avoid remediation and engaging parents,” the mayor said.
He and Malmquist spoke about studies that have shown that the size of a child’s vocabulary when she enters school is a predictor of her future academic success. Exposure to books can mean the difference between a first grade vocabulary of 5,000 words or 30,000 words, Malmquist said.
Tuesday’s event is the first of a series of early-reading themed events to be put on by the New Haven Early Childhood Council.