Library district honored for child literacy program

Yuma County’s library system has been recognized nationally for its efforts to help toddlers get an early start gaining language and literacy skills.

The National Association of Counties in July will present the county’s library district an achievement award for the Smart Start Kits offered by the Yuma Main Library for checkout to parents and child caregivers helping youngsters begin to read.

The award, presented in the category of libraries, will be the sixth honor from the association received by the library district in recent years.

The kits consist of items such as children’s books, puzzles, toys, music CDs or DVDs and videos that relate to 15 different themes. ranging from animals to the alphabet, from bilingualism to beginner science, from space to special needs.

Whatever theme is selected by a library patron, the kit is tailored to present the topic in a way that helps a youngster not yet of school age begin to master the building blocks of language, said Brenda Cervantes, the library district’s grants coordinator.

“The foundation is literacy, but in addition it’s teaching a variety of themes that will help them once they’re in school,” Cervantes said.

Parents, grandparents, guardians, baby-sitters and other child caregivers can check out the kits and use them with children in what are intended to be shared activities.

The kits come with suggestions for use, Cervantes said, but “we want the parents to create their own curriculum because play is how you get (youngsters) to engage.”

Cervantes was working in the library’s Youth Services department when she and other staff members began assembling the kits from scratch from learning materials purchased from Amazon and various teaching sites on the internet.

The kits are designed for newborns up to youngsters of preschool age, Cervantes said.

“It was pretty much just designed to help the library to better serve the youth population, because we know how important it is to expose children to high-quality learning at an early age.

Parents are technically the child’s first teacher, so why not start at home.”

Other themes in the kits include counting, nursery rhymes, transportation and potty training. The latter topic, says Cervantes, has proved to be one of the most popular among patrons checking out the kits.

The Smart Star Kits program was launched at Main Library in October 2019, and today it makes available 25 kits for borrowing anyone in Yuma County.

The National Association of Counties (NACo) is slated to present the achievement award to the library district at the association’s July 23 national convention in Colorado.

NACo advocates for the interests and priorities of county governments before Congress and state legislatures. Its other roles include promoting best policies and practices in county government and efficient use of taxpayer dollars, and improving the public’s understanding of how counties function.

The library district previously won NACo achievement awards for a Hispanic Heritage Month art exhibition hosted by the San Luis Library; a Sensory Storytime program for autistic children, hosted by the Foothills Library; a Foothills Library exhibition of patrons’ art and poetry collaborations; a Day of the Children celebration at the Somerton Library, and for Senior Story Time, in which Main Library staff visited a Yuma nursing home to present programs to residents.