The London Public Library has started a Spanish-English Storytime for families interested.
Families meet every Thursday at the Library’s central branch, where they meet Children’s Librarian Nelson Rosales.
“As we just started earlier in the month, our numbers have been pretty low so far in the beginning,” Rosales said.
The storytime features Rosales reading to the kids, playing games, and doing crafts while using a mix of Spanish and English.
Last week’s story-time had one family in attendance, with Rosales inviting Hunter and mom, who were spending the afternoon at the library, to join him.
“We are here in the library quite often, I like bringing him here for the activities and using the tablets for the educational games,” Hunter’s mom said.
Six-year-old Hunter talked about how they enjoyed the storytime and other activities.
Especially when to help Hunter feel more included Nelson started including Japanese words and phrases with Hunter and his mother being Japanese.
“The library is really cool, I actually also really like making my own comics and I can get a lot of those from here,” Hunter said.
After Rosales was done reading with Hunter, they finished off the story time with a dance party as Rosales turned on a pop song.
Rosales went on to later talk more about the story time going more into detail, with him originally starting the story time, with him speaking English, Spanish, and French.
“When my parents brought me to Canada from El Salvador, we migrated to the prairies and ended up finding people were really accepting of us into the community” Rosales continued.
“I really wished that I had something similar to the story time as a kid, both for myself and those who wanted to learn more and enrich themselves and their children,” Rosales said.
He says the story time and other language-related programs come at a time when they’re more important than ever for the community.
“We have a lot of families who are very new to Canada, the library is one of the first places that they come to as they try to get to know their communities,” Rosales said.
“These programs help make them feel more welcome!” he adds.
Rosales went on to highlight some other programs on offer at London’s libraries, with him also highlighting a Sensory Storytime for kids with certain sensitivities.
The story time will run till March 2nd.
TOMORROW! Drop in to our new Spanish-English Storytime (Ages 2–5) with Nelson, Thursdays at 1:30pm in the Children's Library at Central Library. #LdnOnt pic.twitter.com/m8EonUeHSo
— LondonPublicLibrary (@londonlibrary) February 1, 2023
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