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BCALA NEWS Volume 41, Issue 3

Summer 2014

BCALA unveils Reading is Grand! Celebrating Grand- Families Telling Our Stories @ Your Library grant winners

BY DR. CLAUDETTE S. MCLINN, CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF MULTICULTURAL CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

During the 2014 ALA Annual Conference, Jerome Offord Jr., then- president of BCALA, announced three libraries will receive the 2014 ‘‘Reading Is Grand! Celebrating Grand-Families Telling Our Stories @ Your Library” grant. The program is a celebration of the important role grandparents play in the lives of children, as, through their infinite wisdom and experience, children learn the unique cultural and familial values that help them grow into valuable contributors to the community. The winning-grant libraries were selected based on the level of creativity and originality of program criteria, action plans, level of involvement of grandparents in the activities and impact of the program on the community.

The three winning library programs are:

Jefferson-Madison Regional Library, Central Branch in Charlottesville, Va. The ‘‘Reading is Grand! Let’s Cook”

program will take place in the fall of 2014. Using titles from books such as, My Pop Pop and Me, by Irene Smalls and Illustrated by Cathy Ann Johnson, and Full Full Full of LOVE, by Paul Howard and illustrated by Paul Howard, as well as other books selected from BCALA’s ‘‘African American Grandparents Grand-Families Themed Booklist”, local grandparents will share their stories that will include family recipes with their grandchildren. The recipes will be compiled into a cookbook that will be published and shared with participating grandparents and their grandchildren. After the session, participants will have a cooking lesson and cook one traditional soul food dish together at the PB&J Kitchen.

Calcasieu Parish Public Library, Epps Memorial Branch, Lake Charles, La. The Epps Memorial Library ‘‘Grandparent’s Reading Time” program will be implemented as a four-part series of reading nights for

grandparents and their grandchildren. The first two nights will be story time in which a book selected from the BCALA’s African American Grandparents Grand- Families Themed Booklist is read by the grandparents to the children in the group. The books will be discussed, and parts of the story will be analyzed by emphasizing how stories are formulated from past experiences. The third day, grandparents will be asked to assist their grandchildren in writing their own stories, which may be based on family and personal experiences. On the final day of the series, grandparents and their grandchildren will present their individual stories to the participants. To culminate the program, the stories will be compiled into a book that will be cataloged and distributed to