Promoting children’s literacy is a goal that the Santa Clarita Public Library’s annual Family Literacy Festival has brought to the Santa Clarita Valley with flair for the past 18 years.
This year’s circus-themed literacy festival featured booths and entertainers encouraging kids to read, and also featured presentations and special appearances from city employees – all with the goal of sharing vital information with children and their parents alike about how to be informed, conscientious community members.
“We just want to promote literacy in the community, and not only children’s literacy, but also community literacy,” said Tina Gill, Old Town Newhall Library children’s librarian. “People don’t know the resources … they don’t know.”
Case in point: At the city of Santa Clarita’s Environmental Services booth, city employees were demonstrating the importance of properly handling storm water and solid waste with the help of a special interactive diorama of Santa Clarita.
Kids visiting the booth watched as sprinkles – representing everyday trash – were dispersed over the landscape, alongside brown sprinkles in the fields where miniature cows grazed (those were self-explanatory). As water was poured over the diorama, the sprinkles were pulled into the mini Santa Clara riverbed.
Haley Lawton, an Environmental Services administrative analyst, said the diorama is a great tool for helping kids understand why it’s important to keep pollution out of Santa Clarita’s streets and waterways.
“Especially trash and dog waste — those are some of the more common pollutants that we see,” Lawton said. “This provides a really good tool for kids to visually and hands-on experience, ‘How does that trash that we might just throw onto the street unthinkingly … impact our waterways?’”
The festival also gave kids the chance to learn about the people who oversee their city – even if just to meet them.
Santa Clarita Councilwoman Marsha McLean made a stop outside the Old Town Newhall Library Saturday morning, both to lead a children’s story time session and to introduce herself as a part of their local government.
It’s important for city residents “to know them as people, not just council members,” Gill said. “Going to council meeting is cool, but I am biased, obviously, because I’m a children’s librarian, but story time is cooler.”
Gill said the festival is also a great opportunity to fold fun experiences into a venue for sharing what the city does for Santa Clarita residents, like providing “third spaces,” or social spaces outside the home – such as the Old Town Newhall Library – that don’t require attendees to buy in.
“We like to think of (the library) as a third space. Like, you’re here to do homework, but then (it’s) a third space, right?” Gill said. “This is one of our functions of, like, ‘Hey, look, we’re community. This is some of the ways you can interact with the community.’”
Independent businesses also got to promote their kid-friendly services through the festival, including Geek Girls Society, a youth organization with twice-monthly meetings for young fandom enthusiasts.
“They’re loosely grouped by age, and we do different activities, like STEM crafts, we play tabletop games, but it’s all about celebrating your fandoms and creating friendships and a community,” said Geek Girls Society founder Kate Moore.
Of all the collected resources for promoting literacy that shared a stage at the festival this year, the most surprising might have been the entertainment.
If the many hundreds of kids who passed through this year’s festival remember the lady on stilts, or the woman making kid-sized soap bubbles, it’s possible they’ll remember one master juggler who impressed on his young audience where he learned his craft: his very own local library.