Rhyme Time is a participatory activity for children under two and their parents and/or care providers. Each session lasts about 20 minutes and includes the opportunity to join-in with nursery rhymes and songs. The children’s librarian leads the sessions. Cowes library has also begun undertaking outreach work with the local health centre to help promote Rhyme Time and other library activities and resources to parents and carers who are not already members or users of the library.
Target Audience
Children under two and their parents and/or care providers.
Aim
Specifically, to develop a love of language and a foundation for learning for ‘under 2s’.
More broadly speaking aims included;
* Helping children and young people to enjoy life and make a positive contribution
* Improving group and inter-group dialogue and understanding
* Encouraging familial ties and relationships
* Providing safe, inclusive, and trusted public spaces and services
* Improving the responsiveness of services to the needs of the local community, including other stakeholders
Process
See description. Post implementation consultants where brought in to do a pilot study (see 'evaluation').
Impact and outcome
In the short piloting time available, two libraries were involved with 40 responses were gathered from parents and carers, six from relevant library staff and two from health workers. Summary of findings;
* 88% of parents and carers that participate in Rhyme Time feel that the programme has improved their child’s well being
Encouraging healthy lifestyles and contributing to mental and physical well-being
* Parents and carers feel that a benefit of coming to the Rhyme Time sessions is that it ‘makes them feel less isolated’. On a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being the maximum score and ‘extremely beneficial’), the mean score of the adult participants was 7.2
* 90% of parents and carers met new people through RhymeTime
* 58% of parents and carers met new people through RhymeTime that they also intend to keep in touch with
* 20% of the parents and carers that participate in Rhyme Time were not members of the library at the beginning
* However, 75% of these non-members, have become library members since participating in Rhyme Time
* 90% of the parents and carers have recommended Rhyme Time to other people they know
* Health workers report that Rhyme Time has been very effective in terms of collaborating and joint working
* Health workers report that they are more likely to work with the library again as a result of their work with Rhyme Time
Evaluation
The library did not at that time have a method in place for capturing data about the Rhyme Time participants, as the sessions were not well established and the library had not wanted to discourage participation in the sessions in any way.
The consultants therefore discussed with Cowes and the Isle of Wight Library staff the best way to capture evidence of outcomes in a ‘light touch’ way. As Rhyme Time was running in libraries across the island, the Isle of Wight library service staff were also keen to have a method that could be ‘cloned’ and used in other libraries.
In response to these needs, a series of self-completion questionnaires were suggested: one for the parents and carers; one for the health workers at the clinic and one for the library staff themselves.
Additionaly the consultants investigate outcomes related to joint working (with a health centre)
Tips
Excepting that the sample of adult participants is small, it does seem that Rhyme Time is having a positive effect on all round library use for this age group of children and their parents and carers. It is important to be able to track this, both to underpin resource planning (buying more board books etc.), but also to be able to demonstrate how the sessions and the associated outreach work are improving libraries engagement with the community and helping to transform and extend service provision all round.
Therefore it is likely that relatively ‘light touch’ ways could be found to routinely collect some of the management information captured in the questionnaire. This is an important consideration as early years provision is increasingly part of libraries’ universal offer and therefore cannot attract the level of dedicated resource that is often available for evaluation within a project or programme context.
Project website [1]:
http://www.iwight.com/living_here/libraries/Your_Local_Library/westcowe.asp
Case Studies