Library takes on 'summer slide'

The school year is over — now it's time to find ways to take on the summer slide. The Findlay-Hancock County Public Library is working on a three-prong approach to help keep students from sliding backwards and losing some of the academic gains they've made during the previous school year, said youth services librarian Sarah Cramer. A Libraries Accelerating Learning grant from the Ohio Department of Education will help fund these programs. "We're trying to come at this from a lot of different ways," she said. The library was one of 32 public libraries that received $5 million from the program. The grants were earmarked for libraries planning to create or expand literacy programs for students in prekindergarten through 12th grade. The Findlay library received $59,960 from the program. The grant is paying for a subscription to Brainfuse, a virtual tutoring service for K-12 students as well as job-related support for adults, said Cramer. Students can connect, one-on-one, with virtual tutors who will help them with their assignments in all of the major subject areas. "Say it's a math question that you need help with," she said. "You can put in the math question. They'll kind of take you through step by step making sure you understand at each step why you're doing that," she said. Cramer said this is the first time the library has offered the program. It has been available for several months. The "flagship" portion of the grant will fund a Summer Reading Camp, she said. "It is essentially reading intervention so reading tutoring for K-2 students that just need that little extra help with learning to read," explained Cramer. The program will be available from June 19 through Aug. 5 at the library. But to make the program work, tutors are needed, she said. "Without those tutors, we can't serve those kids," said Cramer. Students will meet for two one-hour tutoring sessions each week for seven weeks. The tutors will work with a small group of children, she said, and they'll see the same children for each of the sessions. The goal is helping children learn to read, said Cramer. "But we do want an element of fun to it," she said. "We do have games and things that we'll incorporate in those sessions." Anyone 16 and older can be a tutor. No teaching experience is needed as training will be provided. Cramer said high school students could earn service hours for helping with the camp. Jenny Cassata is the reading camp coordinator. The grant will also pay for reading intervention kits that Cramer is currently putting together. She said these will include tips, tricks, activities, books and games to help families work on different literacy skills at home. "The idea is that families can check them out or tutors can check them out and they'll have some resources there to work on those skills and just give them some guidance," she said. Parents will be able to work with preschoolers on early reading skills up through older students who just need a little extra help with reading. Cramer plans to have five to six different themes available such as letter awareness, fluency, comprehension and phonemic awareness which is the ability to notice, think about and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. She hopes to have the kits ready by this fall. "And we may have our tutors trying them out during the summer, just to make sure they work the way we want them to before we do a more general release," she said. The grant will provide for these three program for two summers. "It was a lot of time putting the grant together and we were pleased that they chose us," said Cramer. "We think there could be a really big impact for families." For more information or to be a tutor for the Summer Reading Camp, email readingcamp@findlaylibrary.org. A flier is also available at the library with a QR code to register children.