jcarson's blog

The L.P. Fisher Public Library is well-known in our community (Woodstock, N.B., Canada) for our board game programs, like Connect Four Tournaments, Family Game Nights or our (competitive!) Chess Club.

The building blocks of physical literacy begin at birth as we explore our environments with our bodies — but that doesn’t mean our skills are fixed at a certain age! Physical literacy skills can be acquired and improved throughout the lifetime.

This year the LP Fisher Public Library teamed up with our local run club, the River Valley Runners. They got a place to have their monthly meetings, access to awesome running books (and periodicals, thanks to the generous donation of a member), and we got to particpate in their fun runs and help plan their events. It has turned out to be a true win-win.

Creating a physical literacy program at your library doesn’t always have to happen under your roof. Take to the streets (or trails)! Are you already an avid runner or walker? Share your enthusiam. Would you like to be? Get motivated with some helpful volunteers.

We spend a lot of time in libraryland talking about literacy. And there are an awful lot of literacy skills to learn and teach: pre-literacy skills, visual literacy, numeracy, cultural literacy, information and computer or digital literacy…whew! But one of the most overlooked and underappreciated literacy skills is the one we use almost constantly from the time we are born: kinetic literacy, also known as physical literacy.  

Toddlers and preschoolers can be a challenging (and adorable!) age to teach. I highly recommend adding some yoga poses or movement exercises to your storytime programs, if only to help get those wiggles out!  

Welcome to another installment of Kinesthetic Library Programming!  This time we're going to learn about bringing yoga to your littlest patrons and their caregivers.