Little Free Library Meets the Museum

A small wooden box full of books on a post in front of a house, in a field, or on a country road may not seem immediately inspirational. Yet, somehow these book exchange boxes popping up everywhere through the Little Free Library (LFL) have captured imaginations and inspired strangers to share books with others.

Little Free Library at Settergren's hardware store

Ever since I saw my first one outside of Settergren’s Hardware in Minneapolis about 7 years ago I’ve been following the growth of these book hutches with curiosity and interest. Not long after seeing one at Settergren’s, I saw one in Richland Center and another one in Mineral Point (WI) and made my then 90-year old parents stop so I could take pictures of them. Knowing of my delight in Little Free Library, my Dutch pen-pal sent me a photo of one in Leeuwarden where she lives.

Little Free Library was started by Todd Bol and Rick Brooks in 2010 in Hudson (WI), just across the river from the Twin Cities. As of fall 2016, there were over 50,000 LFL in all 50 U.S. states and in 70 countries. 

LFL’s 3 commitments–increasing book access, building community, and sparking creativity–reinforce one another with natural ease.

The on-line introduction to LFL and how to get started are both practical and inspirational. Five easy steps for setting up a library include a material list, plans for building, directions for installing one, and guidelines for finding funds. More tips for building support, filling shelves with books, and replacing them are easy to find. Registering a Library brings with it an official charter sign and charter number.

In sharing the plans, tips, and videos of designs and construction from others, LFL expands the range of solutions for making books accessible, highlights creativity, and supports a community joined by passion, whimsy, and a love of reading. Builders have improvised designs and customized decorations that reflect personal interests, local architectural styles, and regional pride. Libraries are fashioned as an Amish shed, a Vermont covered bridge, and a British phone booth. Some stewards add reading lights and benches; others create small gardens around the library’s post; and some even leave power bars and snacks for hungry readers.

Once books fill the shelves, a library takes on a life of its own, strengthening connections between people

Tudor style library matches its house

who know one another and creating connections between book friends who will probably never meet. Neighbors gather at a library and chat. When passersby stop, browse, take a book, and sometimes leave a book, there’s a sense that someone who cares about reading left this book for a reason. Fans and book friends leave notes of thanks. Reluctant readers leave messages about being inspired to read. At least one homeless reader left a note of thanks for access to books.

   

LFL also inspires significant community efforts. In 2013, the Minneapolis School District collaborated with LFL to establish a library on every block in north Minneapolis, one of the most impoverished districts in the city. A group in Lake Worth (FL) set a goal to place 100 libraries in the city, a project that involved school children, neighbors, and the Vice Mayor. An even bolder vision is being realized by a Sudanese woman who has set a goal to establish 1,000 libraries in her country.

Where are LFL at museums?

The Pink Palace Museum Little Free Library

Museums seem to be natural hosts for libraries with their interest in building community connections, being a good neighbor, activating community partnerships, and in nurturing reading. Several museums have installed libraries on their sites including the following.

• The Little Free Library at the Blairstown Museum in Blairstown (NJ) is “designed to inspire a love of reading, build community, and spark creativity by fostering a neighborhood book exchange.” 

• The Little Free Library in front of the Pink Palace Museum in Memphis (TN) is a replica of the museum’s façade including its distinctive pink Georgia marble and green tile roof. The museum hopes that by hosting a place for people who visit and those living next to exchange books it can be an active part of its community. 

• The Children’s Museum in Bloomsburg (PA) is a collaboration between the museum and the 4 county branch libraries.

• The Neville Public Museum in GreenBay (WI) installed a library on its grounds in spring 2017 built to look like its original home.

Almost any museum could install a library in front of its building inviting passersby to pause, browse, and take a book. Selected books could relate to museum exhibits and programs, feature local authors, or celebrate the region's history. Designed to be consistent with the museum’s brand and possibly offering seating, a museum can make its library into an inviting and distinctive place. Inside, libraries might be located in exhibits as book nooks offering visitors opportunities to dig into a topic or pursue a question or read for the joy of it. Designated spots for collecting books can help support the exchange.

For some museums, LFL could be more than a rotating collection of free books. Rather it might be an opportunity to advance a museum’s broader interests and goals and create greater impact for children, families, neighbors, or residents. (Check out LFL’s Impact Library Program.) Just as the LFL organization’s 3 commitments (increasing book access, building community, and sparking creativity) readily reinforce one another, a museum’s LFL initiative could be a strategy aligned with broader goals, linked with other museum initiatives, and at the heart of an established partnership. Goals might include increasing access to books for community members and encouraging a love of reading; building awareness of local resources; strengthening a sense of community; introducing the museum to new audiences; sharing resources; or extending learning beyond the museum’s wall. Partners and collaborators might be a neighborhood group, community clinic, libraries, the parks department, the school district, or a local clinic.  

Community-based projects in North Minneapolis, Lake Worth, and Sudan are evidence that these libraries are scalable. They can be laid out across a neighborhood, city, county, or country. The possibilities of a geographic focus are open-ended as an example from Visit Seattle that has 9 LFL library book exchanges shows. A strategy to promote Seattle and invite visits, these libraries are in Austin (TX), Boston (MA), and Chicago (IL). Each library is stocked with books that relate to Seattle (by author, subject, or setting). While a museum might not be marketing to tourists across the country, it may be trying to reach and serve audience in rural areas, connect with a nearby tourist area, or have a sister city relationship in another country. Just as the Visit Seattle libraries are thoroughly Seattle (one is made to look like a Seattle ferry), a museum’s libraries could be made to look like the building, an exhibit, local icon, or a popular landmark. 

Book exchange boxes can offer information and activities as well as books. Depending on the focus of the library or selected themes, there could be bookmarks or booklists to pick up; question of the week to investigate; program or event flyers for the museum; simple directions for how to make a book or a cardboard gizmo; or maps of where other libraries are located. Possible extensions are likely to emerge from topics, collaboration, location, and frequenters of the library.   

Mineral Point, (WI)

In taking a LFL project out into the neighborhood, community, or countryside, a museum starts a journey that could go almost anywhere. It might be possible for…

• Libraries to be a project in a museum’s maker space

• Neighbors to paint the boxes to celebrate their neighborhood

• Community members to study the area proposed for the libraries and decide their locations

• Museum partners to collect books to keep the supply going

• Libraries to be located along a bike trail

• Library users to send photos of themselves and their books

What other ideas do you have about how museums could use the Little Free Library?

Worried About Reading

Photo: Luzinterruptus

We are worried about reading. Parents and grandparents, librarians, pediatricians, teachers, school boards, college administrators, employers, museum educators, and avid readers, are worried about children being ready to read at earlier and earlier ages. We worry about the word gap becoming a reading gap becoming a stubbornly persistent achievement gap. We worry about the presence of reading material in homes and about boys not connecting with books. Each summer we worry about summer reading loss. Around 3^rd and 4^th grade we worry about the transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Every year there’s worry about reading test scores and grade-level reading at the end of 3^rd grade and graduation rates. We worry about children, youth, and adults wanting to read. We worry about reading in short bursts on small devices. In museums we worry about visitors reading text panels and way-finding signs

Given what we know about the far-reaching impacts of reading on success in school and throughout life, this concern is not misdirected nor is it exaggerated. Every important social issue is affected by low literacy: poverty, education, employment, social justice. More than merely a single set of skills for sounding out letters and printed words, reading is intimately related to writing, listening, speaking, and thinking. It is through sounds, words, stories, books, and ideas that we explore, understand, and navigate the world starting in infancy. Limited early experiences with language, interactions with others, and access to books can change the life-long trajectory.

Moreover, reading is pleasurable and empowering–something everyone deserves to enjoy.

Our worry about reading is expressed in many and varied ways and at different scales and is clearly not only the domain of schools. Because early language development is early literacy development, campaigns like TalkingIsTeaching, Providence Talks, and the Thirty Million Words initiative are spreading through communities across the country as programs, billboards, and bus sides. Basic literacy is one of the 21stcentury skills highlighted by IMLS. Libraries, schools, community centers, and homeless shelters offer programs and camps to slow summer reading slide and build reading skills. Newspaper articles offer parent tips on encouraging teen reading year round. There are apps for reading, rhyming, and spelling.

How do museums fit into addressing this pervasive challenge? Museums don’t teach reading. It’s hard to find an interactive experience that attempts to explore punctuation, spelling, or transitive and intransitive verbs. Museums, however, do share information and tell stories. As places where people gather and connect and explore objects, artwork, ideas, and fascinating slices of the world, museums combine the conditions that encourage language and literacy development, build an interest in words, and inspire readers of all ages.

As they greet visitors, sell a membership, lead a tour, answer a question, write label copy, museums can, and do, deliberately and actively engage children and adults in speaking, listening, reading and writing; in thinking and making connections, and in deepening enjoyment with ideas and interests. In the exhibits they develop, text they compose, programs they offer, resource centers they house, partnerships they form, authors they present, and in the book clubs they host, museums have a vital role to play in our becoming a nation of readers. Some of the ways this is happening are highighted in the following posts.

  

• Literacy + Learning

The connections between literacy and learning are strong and striking. These interconnections underscore the impact of literacy on learning throughout life, not just in the early years. When museums shape experiences for learning, they also have opportunities to shape experiences that engage and enhance language skills.

• Literacy at Play

Museums are settings rich with fascinating objects, tools, processes, and materials to explore, describe, point to, and play with. They are also social settings explored with family and school groups, people to talk with and listen to. This combination of talk and play is the foundation for literacy. 

•  Playing With … Words

Playing with the sound, shape and meaning of words is an important part of how children learn language and learn to read and play. From knock-knock jokes, to Pig Latin and riddles, playing with words and language, sounds and meaning stretch their language skills. Joyful experimentation doesn’t stop with childhood; adults are often eager punsters, rhymers, and neologists.

• Anywhere and Everywhere … Books

Imaginatively decorated, Little Free Libraries dot lawns, parks, and stores responsive to a passerby’s sudden urge to read or find a bedtime book. In museums, book nooks and reading areas in galleries and exhibitions make it easy for visitors to relax and dig deeper into a topic. Even branch libraries serve visitors in museums.

• Storyland: A trip Through Childhood Favorites

Books children and adults love and remember, whether childhood favorites or world classics, carry information about the world, stimulate conversation, and offer wide access to literacy tools. Whether walking into a book’s illustrations or acting out a story, children and adults immerse themselves in books through active exploration, sharing favorite parts, engaging in pretend play, and inventing stories.

• Book Sculptures

Reading may not be strictly required in book arts, but the expressive possibilities of the book form inspire and empower both new and accomplished readers. Book arts integrate aspects of literacy–letter shapes, words, images, and layout. Experimenting with these elements involves direct experience with the book and its parts and invites constructing new meaning from them.  

• Filling Museums With Words and Language

Words and language help illuminate ideas, deepen a visitor’s understanding, and broaden a view of the world. This is precisely what museums do, do well, and can do more of.

Filling Museums With Words and Language

The Heart's Map at Minnesota Children's Museum

Everyday words and language pour, spill, fly, flow, fill, infuse, inhabit, and animate museums. They are spoken, written, thought, imagined, gestured, recorded, remembered, and signed in interactions and on-line in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic and the countless other languages of our communities.

Text Rain (Utterback)

Words name and describe objects, paintings, and phenomena. They help express how artwork makes us feel and forge connections with past experiences we remember. Narratives are often embedded in exhibits, sometimes explicitly as a part of framing the experience and sometimes loosely connecting experiences and ideas. Visitors read and hear the voices of inventors, settlers, writers, farmers, soldiers, immigrants, artists, and neighbors in famous speeches, newspaper headlines, founding documents, and letters. Museum professionals write texts and labels, catalogs, and scripts for films. Text Rain falls and memorable quotes punctuate museum walls. Using words and images, museums tell their stories to supporters, friends, funders, and their communities.

Words and language are ubiquitous. They welcome, guide, invite, instruct, and inspire children, youth, and adults in museum exhibits, programs, performances, tours, demonstrations, events, catalogs, services, and initiatives. Often, however, they do so incidentally rather than intentionally. But well beyond just getting visitors to read more text (or better written text) or listen to stories, museums can deliberately and actively engage visitors in acts of reading and writing, in thinking and making connections, and in deepening enjoyment.

Is encouraging museums to explore and develop opportunities that emphasize words and language inviting them to go off mission? Adding more to their plates? Becoming more like schools? I think not. In fact, words and language provide an impressive and promising set of opportunities, activities, and experiences capable of assisting museums in accomplishing their missions and goals.

The world of words and language is vast and largely underexplored in museums. This world encompasses basic tools for communication and expression; it is the driver of meaning and understanding; and it provides pleasure. Words and language can also be understood in broader, more flexible concepts and as metaphor. In Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, elements (“Light on two sides”) can be combined to shape spaces to support routines, provide comfort, and bring people together. The 100 Languages of Children grounded in the Reggio pedagogy represents symbolic systems for expression, exploring relations, inventing, and learning.

Words and language help illuminate ideas, deepen a visitor’s understanding, broaden a view of the world, and increase a museum’s impact in many ways and scales.

Placing words and language at the heart of the museum. Some museums like historic homes of authors or The Newseum have words and language at their core as do museums of language.

• Treehouse Museum, Ogden UT focuses on family literacy, children’s literature and the arts and humanities. The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is dedicated to inspiring a love of art and reading through picture books. At Bookworm Gardens stories remembered and imagined are found on 8 acres of woods, fields, and sunny glades. 

Growing 21^st century learners. Three of the 7 IMLS Learning and Innovation Skills, Communication, Visual Literacy, and Basic Literacy, deal directly with words and language. Many museum incorporate these skills in their exhibits and programs. 

• Pre-literacy and early literacy skills are the focus of Minnesota Children’s Museum’s Storyland, Mississippi Children’s Museum’s Literacy Garden, and Louisiana Children’s Museum’s Talk & Play Center. In these settings, parents and caregivers are encouraged to talk with and think about the language they use with their children and its role in cultivating literacy. 
• Stepping Stones Museum for Children’s ELLI Lab School is a comprehensive, high quality language and literacy development preschool program for all children and their families. 
• Creative writing is part of Mia’s Creativity Academy.

Theodore Roosevelt 2 by Carrie Roy

Layering and thickening experiences with the power of words and language to intrigue, engage, and provoke thinking. Pairing words and images in unusual and beautiful ways can tap into visitor’s curiosity and interests as well as make complex information accessible.  

• Data artist Carrie Roy’s work distills literary works, letters, and other groupings of texts down to key concepts or vocabulary and explores them through art. Her Theodore Roosevelt 2 layers words and images based on a textual analysis of Roosevelt’s book to reveal regionally-related word choices.

• In her blog, Marianna Adams describes how the concept of collaborative writing inspired by Japanese renga poetry served as both an activity and embedded performance assessment. Exploring the Gardner Museum galleries, a group substituted verses for objects, spaces, or views using a set of words–rising, distant, enclosed, fold, release. The experience produced beautiful versions that evoked the spirit of Mrs. Gardner and data sources helpful in understanding the connections visitors make with the museum.

Deepening understanding of art, artifacts, current issues. Language used in unexpected ways and places can capture and concentrate visitor’s attention.

• The Getty invited visitors to write a Haiku poem about a selected drawing that used negative space. With multiple examples from the curator who had used Haiku, an un-rhymed three-line poem, for label copy, visitors composed Haiku of 17 syllables in lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables each.

• The Language of Conservation introduced poetry into the Audubon Zoo landscape in New Orleans (as well as in zoos in Milwaukee, Chicago, Little Rock, and Jacksonville) through a partnership of Poets House and the New Orleans Public Library. Lines like, “There is pleasure in these pathless woods” help deepen public awareness and appreciation of environmental issues through poetry.

• Prompts like “listen to an object speak" can generate attention, focus, and surprise while “Describe the place in which this diorama is set” can focus observation. Both are an opportunity to write.

Finding the museum’s voice. Language in its many forms is the voice of the museum about its mission, its audience, and with its community.

• Years ago a poet and a paper artist worked with children at Minnesota Children’s Museum to create The Heart’s Map. “I Am from Love” greets visitors as they enter the museum’s lobby and speaks powerfully to and about the children the museum serves and celebrates.This line has stayed with me for years: “I am from leaving someone. I am from coming to America and knowing nothing, everything. I am from Hmong and German and Senegalese.

• NEMA’s 2015 conference theme, The Language of Museums also points to the importance of recognizing the power of words and language in all aspects of a museum’s work.

Related Museum Notes Posts 
• Learning + Literacy

• Literacy At Play
• Playing with...Words

• Bookworm Gardens

Playing With … Words

“It is the self becoming the word, the word becoming world.”

(CONRAD AIKEN)

Six-year-old Victor points to himself and says, “Victor is mine.” and grins with satisfaction. A girl runs up to her grandfather, saying, “Papa, do you know that sock, clock, and tock rhyme?” A boy carefully steps and pauses on each of the large brass letters that spell Center for the Performing Arts. Three sisters repeat, “Sudikudivita,” laughing at the word they have invented together for their made-up language.

No one who has been around children would wonder at children’s delight in discovering the joy of playing with words; many could easily add to the list. Sometimes adults find themselves gleefully reciting catchy words and phrases from their childhood–Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or a question in pig Latin–with little or no prompting. Here’s ample evidence of the persistence as well as the power of childhood wordplay. The repeated sounds of a baby’s babbling and glee at the silliness of Seuss are both expressions of the joy of wordplay that captivates children (and adults) and instills a love a language.

Children’s acquisition of their primary language is a remarkable achievement in its universality and the speed at which it occurs. The complexity of language and anxieties about test scores, graduation rates, and future careers unfortunately lure us into thinking we must sit children down, teach them words, drill vocabulary, and review punctuation. In fact, playing with the sound, shape and meaning of words is an important part of how children learn language. They encounter the world not only through their eyes, but also through sounds and words. Playing with language is a joy, a way to strengthen what children know about language, and a portal to the world.

Playing With Language

Play and language are natural partners for children. Children both play with language itself and use language as a tool in play.

Babies enjoy moving their tongues and lips to play with sounds and create various vibrations. Toddlers repeat intriguing words and syllables, even creating a chant such as fun-un-un-un. Preschool and kindergarten are the most fertile years for playing with words when children insert catchy rhyming phrases such as easy peasy lemon squeezy at every opportunity. Wordplay extends through the elementary school years when children adapt rhymes, tell jokes, and narrate stories. Typically children play with aspects of language they have recently mastered so the nature of wordplay changes across childhood. For instance, it shifts from delight with words that make no sense–or nonsense because the child can’t understand the double meaning–to the pleasure of making double or unexpected meanings.

As a tool to further play, wordplay is used in various ways. The words what if…let’s pretend…let’s say… allow children to plan, imagine, and pretend. Children stretch their language skills when they make up and act out stories. They draw on words needed in a particular context and talk as a character would. A child might use words associated with the role of a mother, a robber, or a queen. They might adopt storybook language or use words to talk about language, You said you love raspberry tea. Language enhances children’s games as well being part of the play of games like I spy with my little eye. As children become older, pretend play becomes more verbal. Language rather than action defines the play of older children, perhaps one reason we think they have stopped playing.

Playing with words, symbols, sounds, letters, structure, and meaning­ does contribute to children’s acquiring and consolidating reading and writing skills. But is recognizing, selecting, and manipulating sounds, shapes, words, and structure actually play? The self-motivated, satisfying, and innovative activity of children playing with and changing words and language to amuse themselves precisely fits accepted definitions of play.

Wordplay takes place everywhere, in backyards and the backseats of cars; on the way to school and on the playground; in the dress-up corner and in the bathtub; on bicycles and in the grocery cart. And, at museums which are word and language rich settings. With high sensory contexts, immersive settings, and intriguing phenomena; varied activities, props, tools, and objects; and the dynamic social interactions among family members, other visitors and with staff, museums are amazing places of wordplay everyday.

Often opportunities for wordplay for children in museums involve story time with favorite Seussian rhymes or the repetition of Ruth Brown's A Dark, Dark Tale. In going beyond stories and a round of ABCD, museums might incorporate Burma-Shave signs, codes, jingles, knock-knock jokes, limericks, pig Latin, rebuses, riddles, rhymes, and tongue twisters. Occasionally a language-based exhibit like Storyland: A Trip through Childhood Favorites ignites rampant wordplay.

This is where museums typically go when they start with their ideas of language and wordplay.  Children are, however, lexical vacuum cleaners, pattern analyzers, and joyful experimenters and extraordinarily competent and original at discovering found opportunities for wordplay in museums.

Lexical Vacuum Cleaners

Children are ‘lexical vacuum cleaners,’ according to linguist Steven Pinker. They inhale new words at a remarkable rate. For toddlers, this rate is a word about every two waking hours­… everyday. Where do these new words come from? Not from vocabulary lists. Children learn words by mimicry. A 3-year old using an unlikely word like actually or usually has picked it up from an adult or older child. Once tested, probably may be used frequently for the pleasure of its sound and the reaction it elicits. Children also guess a word’s meaning from context; they get the overall gist of what they are hearing (reading, or seeing) from a nearby object, an adult’s gesture, or other references.

Just as children inhale and exhale dinosaur names with great ease and pleasure, they pick up names and terms for what fascinates them. The parts of a suit of armor, a coalmine, or a Madagascar hissing cockroach capture their attention offering new words to play with. And while a child will not understand each term in a volcano demonstration, a rainforest exhibit tour, or maker activity, a program presenter or docent can deliberately intersperse rich, interesting language. Wordplay-worthy vocabulary is animated, uses precise terms for tools and materials rather than these, stuff, things; sprinkles synonyms for materials (like glittery, glinty, glitzy, sparkle, shiny); pairs familiar and less unfamiliar words; and draws on context for cues to the meaning of new words. When staff invites children to describe the motion and sounds of a kinetic sculpture, children will mimic, invent, mix, and repeat alliterative, rhyming and onomatopoetic words that capture the rolling, clicking, popping and dropping sounds of balls.

Pattern Analyzer and Predictor

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom in Storyland

The same pattern finding and predicting that assists children in acquiring a primary language in a relatively short time period is also a source of pleasurable verbal play with noises, sounds, and structure. From Mother Goose to Dr. Seuss, from counting chants to rolling refrains, rhythm and rhyme are pleasurable and powerful assists in children developing a feel for language. Catchy rhythms, rhymes, and repetition help children detect sound units, anticipate what comes next, build vocabulary, and tune into regularities in grammatical structure. Wordplay is physical, social, cognitive, and emotional. Children find tangly talk, ridiculous rhymes, and unending repetitions to be irresistible invitations to move, bounce, dance, skip, and hop, alone or with a group. The Hokey Pokey for 1 is, well, kind of “hokey” but for 100 it is hilarious.

Rhyming time at the museum takes many forms. Port Discovery’s Tot Trails uses exhibit labels in rhyme. Some familiar rhythms and rhymes are so compelling they become the soundtrack during play in and out of exhibits. In Storyland both children and adults moved to the strong, familiar rhythm of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, chanting it under their breaths with great expression; some families kept up a chicka chicka boom boom call-and-response as they cranked letters up the tree.

Pattern finding is not just for young children and children's museums. The Getty invited visitors to write a Haiku poem about a selected drawing that used negative space.With multiple examples from the curator who had used Haiku, an unrhymed three-line poem, for label copy, visitors composed Haiku of 17 syllables in lines of 5, 7, and 5  syllables each. 

Writing Haiku at The Getty

Roaming museum staff can captivate new riddlers by carrying a poem in their pocket, a riddle up their sleeve, or tongue twister on the tip of their tongue. They can recite a well-known rhyming couplet and ask a child–or a group–to complete it. 

Joyful Experimentation

From babyhood through the elementary school years, children’s fearless experimentation with sounds and meaning generates invention, delight, and information about language. Sometimes happy accidents and sometimes intentional, playful experiments with noises and sounds spawn new words like splutter or lasterday. In my childhood brune and breen were used for brown-blue and blue-green, respectively. Children combine words to make a new one like eleventeen. They use old, familiar words in new ways to describe something new. A choice word here and there is also helpful in making incredible things happen in play. Just declaring that the sand in the bucket is poison has a powerful effect on the course of play.

Inspiration for children’s playing with words is everywhere, even a new word picked up from others. Teacher and storyteller Vivian Paley, captures a lively play sequence among 3- and 4-year olds as they make sense of a new word one of them had brought to school. A single word, waterbed, elicited questions, puns and rhymes in a dramatic play sequence that showed up over several days. Invention and possibility are not bound by what exists, but by what is real, imagined, or even contrary. Children love to name and make up names for objects, people, quantity, places, and colors. Mislabeling or intentionally assigning a wrong name to a person or object is a game of humorous incongruities.

Walk through an exhibit and sound effects are coming from children using their mouths, lips, tongues, and cheeks to create a helicopter’s whir and whap-whap-whap, a dinosaur’s roar, or the loud sounds of feigned injuries acquired during a knight’s fierce battle. Museum staff, parents, grandparents, and caregivers can amp up the playful tone with words and phrases remembered from childhood from jum-jills to Heffalump to slithy toves and listen in for the birth of new words.

Group wordplay multiplies the joy. At Minnesota Children’s Museum, a voice over the sound system announces a group’s departure and ends with “…and come again s-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-n!” In seconds, children of all ages, throughout the galleries and in the atrium leap and croon letting out sounds of, s-o-o-o-o-o-o-n!

An "M" for Mulan written in blocks

The “lexical vacuum cleaners”, pattern analyzers, and joyful experimenters that enter our museums everyday are extremely capable of directing their own wordplay. They don’t need an ABC rug or written labels for door or chair. Their natural fascination with language and the world, along with their imaginations and ingenuity, ensure they will make meaning out of (and with) everything. Children will count, chant, and dance as they step on a tree cookie, a spiral maze, or brass letter shapes. They will form letters and words with sticks, stones, clay, mud and sand; write their names with chalk, blocks, and light writers; and recall the names of shells in a discovery drawer and tools on a makers bench. 

Museums can and should play along.

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Learning  + Literacy

• Books for Every Reason

• Literacy At Play

• Anywhere and Everywhere Books

Recent & Recommended Readings

 
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I feel tremendously lucky that I need to spend time on my professional reading regularly and frequently. While finding the time for it is a challenge, being able to settle in and enjoy the thinking and perspectives of museum colleagues working to inhabit their professional practice feels like a privilege.

I am also challenged to fully inhale, retain, and internalize the news, ideas, study results, and perspectives as much as I would really like. Yet, even when I’m fuzzy on the details and sometimes on the big ideas of an article, I often remember very vividly reading an article: where I was and what I was doing. I recall the sensation of tracking ideas as they link up with a click or taking in a slow, easy breath as something I thought I knew now feels more secure.

Sharing what I read–a snippet, a quote, an article–is also a treat. Seeing a study inform a museum’s work is as rewarding as is sending off a “just-in-time” reference for a proposal deadline.

It’s hard to pick a favorite among so many good journals from my reading list, all of which I recommend: American Journal of Play, Curator, ASTC Dimensions, Journal of Museum Education, Hand To Hand, Museum, Stanford Social Innovation Review, The Informal Learning Review, and Visitor Studies.

Recently I have been referring to, mentioning, rereading, and thinking about three articles in particular. One is on the play-literacy-environment connection, another on parent engagement, and a third on children’s nature play. Besides exploring relevant aspects of museum’s strategic and learning interests, each does so in a way that broadens current thinking to inform, and possibly shift, museum practices.

Play-Literacy-Environment

In The Play-Literacy Nexus and the Importance of Evidence-Based Techniques in the Classroom (American Journal of Play, Vol. 4, No. 2), Kathleen Roskos and James Christie take on two difficult-to-define concepts, play and early literacy, and look at them together with the physical environment. Admittedly, I am biased about this nexus with long-standing interests in children’s play, early literacy development, and children’s environments. To their credit, the authors manage to both support and temper my excitement about the physical environment’s potential to support play and enhance literacy development. Even as the article identifies areas in which specifics of a literacy-rich environment remain unclear and must be addressed, it also opens up an understanding of the play-literacy-environment relationship to explore and push on.

The authors review theoretical frameworks that support their play-literacy hypothesis and follow with scholarly research indicating that a literacy-rich play environment promotes literacy behaviors in children during the developmental ages of three to five. They identify three fundamental principles present in a literacy-enrich play environment.

• The infrastructure principle relates to the basic arrangement, display, and storage of furniture, equipment, and materials that is intentional in informing and organizing experiences as well as attractive and full of images, text, words, and visual arts.
• The authenticity principle calls for play areas, indoors and out, with materials and tools that afford opportunities for a variety of everyday literacy experiences of drawing, writing, decoding, and reading.
• The complexity principle values varied and complex material resources with multiple parts, multiple sensory modes, and multiple uses that hold children’s attention, challenge their thinking, extend communication, and encourage expression.

While the research comes from the early childhood classroom, its focus on play and play environments is relevant to museum settings planned with young children in mind. These three principles are often present in museum settings for young children. Moreover, museums have expertise developing and designing environments and experiences. They shape spaces, create experiences, and engage young learners and their more literate companions. The play-literacy-environment nexus identified by Roskos and Christie appears to be an opportunity for museums to work deliberately, find, and test their contribution to this area.

Parent Engagement

When I wrote about parent engagement last year, I was both inspired by the importance of engaging parents in museums and frustrated with the challenges of doing so well. Both sensations have persisted, aggravated by a lack of frameworks for parent engagement relevant to museums. Whether the frameworks I have come across and others have recommended are for early childhood or school age children, they focus on parent involvement with schools. Parent engagement in their children’s education is critically important; but these models overlook the valuable out-of-school time and role museums and other informal learning settings might play. 

In Breaking Down Barriers: Museums as Broker of Home/School Collaboration, Jessica Luke and Dale McCreedy (Visitor Studies, 15(1) 2012) look at how to expand thinking about parent engagement and role that museum programs might play. They describe results from two complementary studies of a parent involvement program designed and implemented by a museum. Luke and McCreedy draw on a conceptual framework (Ecologies of Parental Engagement) that has emerged from studies of parent engagement with urban schools and that uses the concept of capital that can be activated: parents’ strengths, experiences, and resources.

Listening to parents talk about the features they attributed to their involvement revealed for Luke and McCreedy how the museum program afforded parents opportunities to think about and support their child’s learning science. The museum program played a role in giving parents resources for participating in their child’s schooling. Through informal, casual interactions often around shared activities with other parents and teachers, parents accessed different types of information about their child; they increased their comfort with and found entry points to more formal school structures. Activities and connections built a feeling of being part of a larger group. Opportunities and situations created by the museum program also helped parents learn about their children, their interest in science, and how they learn science. Drawing on enhanced personal resources, parents were able to find ways to have a presence in their child’s schooling, shift the role they played, and participate as a family in activities outside of school including a museum visit.

Museums are building their own capital in listening to visitors, developing relationships, building on strengths, and grounding engagement in activities. These two studies take a valuable a step in rethinking parent engagement and where museums can help parents navigate and engage around their child’s learning.

Recognizing Children’s Nature Play Tendencies

For a venture outside my regular set of journals, I recently found my way to Orion magazine (July/August 2012).

David Sobel combines a developmental perspective with a wonderful ability to recognize children’s nature play tendencies to push on a shift in environmental education in Look, Don’t Touch: The Problem With Environmental Education. Where others see an opportunity for an environmental education lesson, Sobel notices and describes children’s joyful encounters with the natural world on their own terms. These moments, he notes, are being lost for a range of reasons including urbanization, changing social structure of the family, and stranger danger.

He also notes and is bold and articulate in describing a troublesome disconnect. While adults lament children’s loss of contact and freedom in nature and promote protection of the natural world, they nevertheless structure activities for children around knowledge about nature that they, adults, want them to have. “Much of environmental education today has taken on a museum mentality,” Sobel writes, “where nature is a composed exhibit on the other side of the glass.” (Ouch!)

What Sobel understands from a grounding in both nature education and children’s development is that for children to connect with nature, they must have experiences in nature. The character of these experiences varies with children’s development, but shared opportunities for children to connect with nature, even if (or perhaps, especially if) it’s messy, unstructured, a little risky, and tromps a few plants along the way.

An emergent body of research is starting to clarify the relationship between childhood experience and adult stewardship behavior. A child’s first-hand, on her-own-terms exploring wild or semi-wild places over many hours correlates with adult environmental values and behavior. This is a remarkable and valued combination: beliefs and action. While the research Sobel is reporting is not granular enough to differentiate between particular types of environmental education experiences, it’s hard to overlook a basic message. Children’s wild nature play, following their joy, and leaving the trail is valuable.

•   What are your recent and recommended readings?