Sandwell libraries ‘Toddler Tales’ was officially launched on 8 June 2007 at Sandwell Valley during the Barnado’s Big Toddle event.

The Bookstart Bear managed to attend the event and was warmly greeted by hundreds of children. Most of the children wanted to hug him, although he did catch a couple trying to pull his tail! He certainly attracted a lot of children to our mobile library of which 65 then joined the library.

Toddler Tales is the vehicle through which Sandwell Library Service promotes the ‘Time to Talk’ initiative with the key focus aiming to support the speech and language skills of children between 0 – 3 years.

So far, the initiative has offered storytelling training to many of Sandwell library staff to enable them to confidently offer storytelling sessions at their libraries. The enjoyable and motivating training has galvanised staff into action and storytelling sessions are now offered widely throughout the libraries in Sandwell. To support these sessions, the funding provided by the Time to Talk initiative has allowed us to purchase wonderful storysacks and puppets.

The next few months in Sandwell should be very exciting as we look forward to visits by professional storytellers and lots of varied childrens activities within libraries to further promote a love of books and booksharing.

Many more sessions to follow see Library What’s On