Laughter, singing and sign language fill Monday and Saturday mornings in Duluth’s parks. The Duluth Public Library, in partnership with the Parks and Recreation Department, has hosted an outdoor reading and play program for children every week for the past four years in parks throughout the area.
And this year they are now offering American Sign Language interpretation to make story time and learning more accessible.
Carmella Hatch, the Duluth Public Library’s early literacy coordinator, told me how ASL came to be part of her story-and-play activities.
“A customer reached out and asked if we had ever used sign language for storytimes. We have used ASL at a few library events before, usually our larger events like our Kaleidoscope programs, our Drag Queen storytime, and we had never done it for a regular storytime like this,
but we thought this would be a great opportunity. We go out into the community and try to meet people where they are, and we thought it would be a great program to create a little more accessibility.”
Story and game plan
For the fourth year, Story and Play in the Park takes place on Monday and Saturday mornings in various city parks. The program begins with an interactive story hour led by library staff, followed by open
Play time with equipment, activities and guidance from park staff. Story time begins at 9:30 a.m., play time is from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Carmella explained the schedule as follows:
“It starts with a nice story and then there’s the opportunity for free play. Parks and Rec always has a craft program, they have a lot of toys that are specifically geared towards that age group of zero to five. Of course there’s the playground and as a library we offer a mobile book lending service, we can sign people up for library cards and we always bring free books to take home so anyone who doesn’t have a library card can take a book.”
Story and Play in the Parks took place most Mondays throughout the summer and has now resumed its last program that comes Saturday the 17th will take place at Chester Park.
Next year’s schedule and additional programs can be found on their website. As with their events calendar, there are more programs planned for this summer. From Story Times and Play in the Park to Story Times at each of their library locations. Both for Family, meaning birth to five years old, and Baby, meaning zero to two years old.
