National Library Week

4/10/2025

Carrie Brown, Director of Educational Information Services

Greetings from the Trinity School Library! Each week, I am privileged to share time with each of your children in the School library. We spend our time together reading a story, talking about books, and finding new worlds to discover and explore! This coming week, April 6-12, is National Library Week. Libraries serve an important purpose in our society, as they support intellectual freedom, build community, and foster lifelong learning. National Library Week was first celebrated in 1958 and continues to bring awareness of the importance of libraries and literacy to schools and communities. In honor of this special week, I would like to share some insight on the benefits of reading to and sharing books with young children.

While coming to the library on a weekly basis and reading books at home and in school helps preschool-age children to develop a love of books, it also does much more! Listening to books helps preschoolers develop oral language skills and build vocabulary. Children also begin to understand that writing represents spoken language and that pictures represent real-world objects, making the abstract concrete. Reading aloud also helps children develop phonological awareness skills or the sounds associated with words and syllables, a foundational skill for decoding words. Reading a story with parents or teachers helps children build concepts about print, including the concept of letters, words, and sentences and the directionality of text. Preschool-age children also learn to understand the elements of narrative, such as sequence of events and cause and effect, as they listen to stories. Lastly, sharing stories with children helps build the crucial social and emotional skills they need to navigate this world.

If you have not yet visited one of the branches of our local library, I encourage you to do so! With your free library card, you will be able to access thousands of physical copies of children’s books, as well as hundreds of children’s eBooks and audiobooks! Below are some fun activities and reading activities to support literacy development:

Read rhyming books such as Dr. Seuss, to help kids identify rhyming words and sounds. (builds phonological awareness)
Have your child tell you about the story you read to them and encourage the vocabulary such as “first, then, next, finally…” (builds a sense of narrative and comprehension)
Make up your own stories by taking turns adding to the plot. (fosters creativity and understanding of narrative)
Point out letters and words in text and see if children can identify them and find them somewhere else on the page. (builds concepts about print and the supports the idea that print contains a message)
Let children draw a picture to go along with what you read to them. (supports comprehension and attention to detail)
Ask your child to tell you what they think is going to happen in a story. (supports comprehension and inference skills)
Reread favorite books over and over again! (memorization is a pre-reading skill)
Have your child act out a story or use stuffed animals to retell a story. (builds comprehension)

Happy Reading!

Carrie Brown

Director of Educational Information Services

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Trinity School of Midland

3500 West Wadley Avenue, Midland Texas 79707 - Email: info@trinitymidland.org - Phone: (432) 697-3281 - Fax: (432) 697-7403 -