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6 March 2025

In this episode we explore the transformative Literacy Without Barriers project at Kingston Community School. Teacher librarian Kirsten Barich and parent Katie Hines share how this program is empowering families with creative book packs designed for kids aged 0 to 5. Aimed at nurturing a love of reading, the packs include books, user-friendly activity guides and materials for hands-on learning. Along with boosting students’ confidence, the program is also breaking down barriers for parents and fostering connections within the community.

Show Notes

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach a Podcast about teaching and learning in ���ϳԹ�. My name's Dale Atkinson from ���ϳԹ�'s Department for Education and today we're talking about literacy without barriers. We're breaking down those barriers to literacy and we've got a community driven success story at Kingston Community School and I'm joined by Kirsten Barich, who's the teacher librarian there and Katie Hines, who's a parent.

Welcome to you both.

Kirsten Barich: Thanks for having us.

Katie Hines: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: The Literacy Without Barriers Project at Kingston Community School. Kirsten, what is it?

Kirsten Barich: We established this project back in 2003 and it's been about the creation of book packs for families to borrow from our library. We are lucky to be a joint use library so we serve both our school community and our wider community and so these book packs are available to every family in our region.

So we've selected 35 different picture books and we've got six copies of each book. The main part is that each book comes with quite a detailed but very user friendly guide [00:01:00] of some hints of how to read the book, the learning intention behind the story, some ideas of how to talk about it, sing with it, ask questions about it to help the children build meaning from their stories.

Within each pack we also have key themes and key ideas of how to play with it and we've included lots of materials in the pack to run an activity based on the story. So, for example, one story encourages families to make and excavate frozen dinosaur eggs. Another one's about measuring water displacement. There's a pack about engaging with First Nations perspectives and so each activity that's in the pack is designed to be hands on, easy to do at home. All of the materials are included within the pack because we just want to really encourage families to be able to engage with reading and all the activities without spending any money or having to find resources.

Dale Atkinson: They sound like fantastic resources. Now, you've deliberately gone after children from zero to five, why that cohort of [00:02:00] kids in particular?

Kirsten Barich: We had a few intentions here. Number one being that we were noticing a downward trend in school readiness data. And I think that's common in many areas throughout the state, but in particular ours, and it's something that the Words Grow Minds campaign is seeking to eradicate. And we thought that as a library that was already quite a trusted hub within our community, as well as our school, we were perfectly placed to support families in changing that trend. You know, a conduit between preschool and school so again, perfectly placed.

We also know that 90 percent of a child's brain is developed between naught to five and so those early learning years are the optimum time to be reading and engaging with stories. Secondly, because we run preschool programs from the library and we work with our early learning centre once a fortnight, we noticed that there were actually a lot of adult barriers to early childhood literacy.

It might be their adult literacy skills, adult confidence, financial barriers, access barriers. And so we just wanted to [00:03:00] remove any that we could, any possible thing in a really supportive and non-judgmental way.

And thirdly, and probably most importantly, we just wanted to remind families that reading is fun and should be fun. Any reading that you do at home is good reading. You know we teach and we learn about the mechanics of reading in the classroom and in schools. But as a library, we can support the love of reading and the development of dispositions like curiosity and questioning through reading so, yeah, lots of intentions.

Dale Atkinson: How important has it been to engage with the parent community around this?

Kirsten Barich: It's huge. As we know, as teachers it takes a community to raise a child. And so we're noticing that when you have the parents on board, when the parents are confident, when they are engaged and they see that the school and the library is trying to engage with them, I think they're much more likely to have a positive attitude toward the school and just education in general.

Dale Atkinson: What have you seen in terms of impact that this program's had on the teaching in those early years for your colleagues.

Kirsten Barich: I think for colleagues it's just enabled them to connect with the library a little bit more. I think prior to this, we, we mainly saw reading in the early years of learning as how to read.

And so we really tried to bring back the idea in quite a big way. Um, that yes, obviously learning how to read, learning the mechanics of reading is super important and without those building blocks. It is impossible to read, but a love of reading is just as important.

So we need to balance our reading and our readers that we use in the classrooms with just any sort of texts that kids love and they want to read, because I think the more excitement, the more fun you can create about reading, the more likely you are going to be able to develop lifelong readers.

Dale Atkinson: It's really impressive listening to you talk about, you know, how this process has kind of worked through and assisted the broader school activities. How have the resources from the Literacy Packs been integrated into classroom activities?

Kirsten Barich: Well, I actually get to work with all of the primary classes. Um, I teach reception German and I also work with R-6 through the library. And so I incorporate lots of the themes and the activities of Literacy Without Barriers through all of that.

Whether it's developing questioning, whether it's using actual activities or whether it's just developing the dispositions. For example, we've done lots of colour experiments using the packs, we've made garden stews, we've gone on hippopotamus hunts, um. We've made magic hats to practice fine motor skills.

There are lots of dispositions that we can develop through using these packs. And interestingly too, we've had an uptake of the packs with our SACE child studies students. So they've been engaging with the packs to design activities for younger students. They've workshopped the packs with some of our receptions and year ones.

And they've also used them to help develop their own knowledge around early childhood literacy. Which is great. It was really unexpected benefit that we hadn't foreseen.

Dale Atkinson: That's an incredible sort of self-sustaining collaboration there, that's incredible. You mentioned earlier the data around the kid’s preparedness and literacy in the early years was one of the things that kind of drew your attention to this as an area of focus. What has been the result in terms of those numbers? What have you seen as a result of this program?

Kirsten Barich: Well, I think that. We've seen a lot more parental engagement with the library from a much earlier age. So, we've always run preschool programs here at the library, but we've seen more families borrowing, particularly borrowing the packs.

And it's been especially noticeable among families who didn't use to engage with the library at all, or perhaps where people who hadn't had the best schooling experiences and so weren't what you would call, readers themselves. I think that's probably been one of the main things. We're also noticing that families are staying longer at the library, and they're bringing in a whole range of children, whether they're really young or even, you know, mid primary, which has been really good.

And we've also noticed that there's just much more of a happy, positive atmosphere around reading at the moment. There are big groups of children that'll come in really excited to tell us. What they've read at home or what they've been creating and, and asking, can we help them choose their next book and that as a librarian, that's just the most special thing that you can have when you're, you're getting children in your space that are really engaged, really wanting to read. Yeah. It's amazing!

Dale Atkinson: That sounds incredibly rewarding. Now, Katie Hines, parent of two children, I believe. Tell us a bit about your family, Katie.

Katie Hines: So I have two young children. I have an almost two-year-old young boy named James, and I have a five-year-old, Emma, who was in this new mid-year intake. Who’s just started school.

Dale Atkinson: An exciting and busy time for you. How are the reading packs and, and the literacy without barriers project? What's, what's been your interaction with it and how has that helped you in your journey with your kids?

Katie Hines: So, um, I've been really lucky that I've been able to come in and go to say baby bounce, for example, with both of my kids and coming into the library and having something other than just say the books and having the book packs has been great. My five-year-old absolutely loves them. She loves coming back in and sharing her creations with whoever's working in the library. They're really great for the sense that we start them when we're still in the library, you know, they borrow them, both of my children are very confident when it comes to the library and they go up to Cherie and one of the other librarians and they literally get the scanner and scan their own book in and out, but that's facilitated based on what the library creates and the atmosphere that they create here that you kind of feel like you're part of the furniture when you come in and part of the family and yeah, you can get your book pack and go off and do it when you're at home.

Dale Atkinson: Have you noticed the confidence in your kids growing as a result of interacting with the with the books and the packs?

Katie Hines: Absolutely. Um, particularly my five-year-old, she loves the book pack. She loves borrowing them. She'd borrow a book pack every day if I let her. And I have to, you know, kind of be like, Oh, we've still got this one, let's finish this one off before we get too many. But we often have two or three book packs on the go at one time. She loves getting the book out. She loves reading it. We can't go to bed at night without her reading a book. Or two or three or four. We have to negotiate. She's at that stage where we're in negotiation on how many books we can read at night, depending on time, but she is confident in the sense that she can get it out.

She understands on the card that's in there, whether what the activity might, she can't read it at the moment, but you know, she knows that one section's about reading, one section's about singing, one section's about making and playing, and there's just lots of different activities just within a singular book pack that she's confident enough to get it out and lots of kids like repetition. So, you know, she borrows the same one over and over again, which is great because she knows the story. She can tell you the story. So you kind of see that confidence develop just through that repetition, she might not be able to read the words, but she has learnt lots of books, which is great for her development. So, we're really happy as a family that the library provides opportunities for us to really enrich our kids’ lives.

Dale Atkinson: And does it help build connections with the school and the wider community for you?

Katie Hines: Absolutely. I think that as a mum living in the country, it can be really isolating once you've had a kid. When you've been working full time and then you go to not working and being at home with your kids, sometimes you can get a little bit lost. The library has provided multiple opportunities for people to engage with our library. But, you know, you can come in, the book packs are starting to like, they're so popular that as a mum, I'm talking to other mums at baby bounce about what packs have they used that are good and the kids are talking amongst themselves. I think it's just a great opportunity to kind of like, “Oh what are we going to do today?” Or like you know, you look at the four walls in your house and you're like, “I've got to get out of this house.” Like my two-year-old is becoming a tornado. The library provides that place where you can pop out of the house, go for a walk, go to the library, grab a book pack, go home. My toddler's now asleep. Now I can sit down with my five-year-old and give her all the attention that she's wanting. We can do the pack. And then when my two-year-old wakes up. We can, like, do other activities with him. So, I think that the packs really provide great opportunities for families to engage in literacy.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, that's great and Kirsten being a teacher librarian, not everywhere has a teacher librarian, not everywhere has a library. What's your recommendation in terms of schools that perhaps don't have that specialist resource in terms of how they might apply some of the thinking that you've, you've put into practice here for perhaps kids who are a bit older, somewhere, you know, that 5 to 10 range, what sort of things should they be doing?

Kirsten Barich: I think that the way that we've created these, there's a lot of scope for differentiation. You know, we focused a lot on the naught to five age bracket, but the basic premise behind it is that you are encouraging kids to read, talk, play, sing. Which is good for all children, regardless of how old they are.

And so any school, whether they've got a library or not, we have specialist teachers within them. Specialist teachers of literacy, specialist teachers of numeracy, specialist teachers of science. We've all got pedagogy behind us. We all know how important it is to create varied learning experiences for kids.

And so, any school could take the idea that we've got here and make it their own. A lot of our packs focus on things, for example, that we can do and find in our local region. So some of them, for example, encourage kids to explore the lighthouse. Some of them, um, encourage kids to go to the beach or have a look at the sundial. But, you know, if you're up in the Barossa, for example, you might have something around visiting some of the vineyards or something like that. And so I think whatever resources they have, they've got the expertise within their teachers to create something like this for the children that are in front of them.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, I think that's, that's a really great message Kirsten. Thank you very much. Now, I know the weather down there is very good. Your middle school is having their swimming carnival today, so we won't keep you any longer but thank you, Kirsten. Thank you, Katie, for your time.

Kirsten Barich: Thanks so much for having us.

Katie Hines: No worries. Thank you.