Library Work with Children

by Alice Isabel Hazeltine

ST. LOUIS

In the playgrounds one regularly employed storyteller, who also assists in directing the games, tells stories throughout the season. Storytelling is also carried on by playground assistants and by volunteer storytellers. The interest shown by parents who frequently join the story hour groups in the parks, is considered a significant gain in sustaining neighborhood interest in the playground.

In one settlement house, the head worker meets the storytellers at the beginning of the season and plans and directs the work for the entire year.

Storytelling in the St. Louis Public Library has been carried on for several years by children's librarians of branch libraries who have visited playgrounds, settlements, and public schools, as visiting storytellers, and have told stories at mothers' clubs and teachers' meetings. Since February, 1910, it has been under the direction of the supervisor of work with children, who was formerly one of the visiting storytellers and assistants to the supervisor of work with children in the New York Public Library. Storytelling is regarded by her as a valuable aid in the unification of the work with children in a system of libraries.

STORYTELLING IN OTHER COMMUNITIES

The reports received represent only a small part of the storytelling that is being done in different parts of the country.

In New Jersey, the organizer of the State Library Commission has found her ability to tell stories and to choose books containing a direct appeal to the people who are to read them, or to listen to the reading of them, an open sesame in the pine woods districts, the farming communities, and the fishing villages, where grown people listen as eagerly as children. In a paper entitled, "The Place, the Man, and the Book," Miss Sarah B. Askew gives a vivid picture of the establishment of a library in a fishing village. (Proceedings of the American Library Association. 1908.)[4]

[4] Reprinted as a pamphlet by The H. W. Wilson Company.

Recognizing a similar need for the interpretation of books to the communities where libraries had already been established, the Iowa Library Commission appointed in 1909 an advisory children's librarian, who is also a professional storyteller and lecturer upon children's literature.

In the Public Lecture courses of New York City, it has been found that storytelling programs composed of folk tales draw large audiences of grown people who enjoy the stories quite as much as do the children.