>>ALLEN COLEMAN: I am a digital media and instructional technology coordinator for the College of Arts and Sciences here at the Ohio State University. I'm also a Ph.D student at the College of Education. >>INTERVIEWER: Allen, one of the things we've talked about on and off for the last five or six years is the way that you've used the city library services being sponsored for your children's legacy and I'm just curious to hear more about that. >>ALLEN COLEMAN: Well, one of my first jobs out of graduate school was working for the Literacy Collaborative and we worked closely with the libraries. Even before I started working there libraries were important to me, it was a service that I used a good deal, but I wasn't a parent before I started. The focus of the Literacy Collaborative was working with elementary school teachers, with very young students, you know, teaching them to read. Especially troubled students. Not troubled students but students who encountered difficulty reading. And so I was very interested in this. So I participated in some of their work with the teachers and I connected with many of the folks at the library through that. But then after I became a father, I was a reader myself, I loved it, and I wanted to share that kind of passion with my children and so it was a good way to introduce them initially to books and to adventures. It was a great way for us to spend time together too so that's how it really started. And over time as they grew up, my daughter is now about eleven years old, my son is six, they both are in school but as my daughter started initially, we started to work together working at home to keep her moving forward, to really enjoy reading. So that's really how it began. Over time I connected with the library to do some other kind of public service announcement activities. What you're talking about as well, to encourage others to be readers. And it was a lot of fun. The best part was, for us, the library was part of every day life. I stopped there on the way home, it's on the way home. We pick up stuff every day. We read every day. We have something out at home we call a reading circle where we all have different books and we share. That may be a bit more than you're interested in but it's a lot of fun for us. I love films and television and stuff like that but it's a great way to get away from that too and to share things and adventures and spark ideas. >>INTERVIEWER: Can you describe one of those reading circles? What are they like? >>ALLEN COLEMAN: Okay, well, we'll select different books that we're all interested in. I teach on Saturdays so after teaching on a Saturday I'll stop at the library on the way home and I'll grab books that I think every one is interested in in different areas. And I'll come home with those and we'll all take different turns. Now, my son is six and he's just beginning to read and he's doing sight words and so I'll often get books that he wants me to read to him and so when it's his turn he'll sit with me, we'll read together. He'll do sound effects and read the words that he's identified, his sight words. Which is really a lot of fun. And then I'll get books that, my wife writes, and so there's books that she's interested in and my daughter is also interested in and then we'll share. And so we go around the circle. That's really what it's like. And the books could vary. It could be anything from Coreline, which my daughter and I read together a couple weekends ago before we saw the film, Mouse Guard, which is an adventure book, graphic novel kind of thing that my son loves and there's sight words in there he can identify but I read those and he does the sound effects and we kind of act it out. When my daughter was small ,before my son was born, we read a book by Keven Henkes called Julius, the Baby of the World, and we love that book. Lily is an incredible character. And that's another book that my daughter will read to my son and it's fun because there's always those kind of sibling things that go on and they can share the love and the battles with the book. There's another book, it's called Friends 'til the End and it's African American girls. And I got this book because the cover image reminded me of my daughter and her friends. And she loves these friendship, and of course at this age it's something that's very important to kids that age, and so I selected that book. And my wife writes and so this might be something that she'd write and she really enjoyed reading it back and forth with my daughter and we all got into it. That's an example of one reading circle. [Laughs] >>INTERVIEWER: That's wonderful. >>ALLEN COLEMAN: And it happens on a Saturday afternoon at the kitchen table. >>INTERVIEWER: Are there other ways that you use the libraries? You said you select books, do the kids go? >>ALLEN COLEMAN: Absolutely. >>INTERVIEWER: Do they select books on their own? >>ALLEN COLEMAN: Yes they do. I used that example because it happens a good deal when I'm on the way home after teaching but we often go as a group, we go, and the kids would identify the books that they like. My son has a thing for pop ups right now, at six right? [Laughs] And actually he's a little bit upset about the fact that the pop up symbol on the side of the book isn't always consistent. [Laughs] And so he doesn't like that. That's how much we go. I mean, really. And so we'll go through and we'll select the books that he's interested in and he'll pull them out and if they're flat books and not really pop ups he's not as interested. And so those have to go back. But then the actual pop ups, we'll read together and he'll select the ones that he wants to take home and read again. And then there's always that struggle when we have to leave. I love that, that when we have to leave the library he's upset because he wants to do more. See, that is a victory for us cause now they're interested in reading and they see the library as a resource. My daughter had to do some reports. She's done some work on Dr. Seuss and so we'd use the library online system to identify the books that she wanted and we'd go gather those together and we'd work on those reports together. She's great, I mean she's like a researcher in the sixth grade. And then her own personal interest, she's really interested in mythology and stuff like that, particularly mermaids, and so I encouraged her to be a researcher, to find the books, and so she used the system online, went to the library, identified all these books that talked about mermaids and things, and we'd go through those together. And she's a writer to so that is sparking her imagination. Those are some examples. >>INTERVIEWER: That's really good. There's no reason I wouldn't have thought it, but I hadn't thought of kids that young getting use of the online-- >>ALLEN COLEMAN: Yeah. [Laughs] With our world right? [Laughs] Exactly >>INTERVIEWER: Well great, anything else? >>ALLEN COLEMAN: I love our libraries. We do more with that, you can get videos and things like that, but there's so much online. We use it to gather interesting videos and things like that but we don't use it for the videos as much. Music is a really great tool too. They have all kinds of things. They have lots of resources that get us in there as well. I think, one of the things that I'd like to share the most is that all of our family uses it. And the branch system is really great. Why do we use the online system? Because when we do that we can have all of the books we need sent to our branch. So it's on the way home. And that's why we love it, it's something we can use regularly, they make it convenient for us. My daughter wants to work at the library. [Laughs] She wants that summer job thing that they do so she wants to get on the list now so she have that. I guess the point, what I'm trying to say is that, for us, it's become a really valuable resource for learning and I love the fact that I've been able to, because the system helps us make it convenient, that it's helped us as parents, my wife and I, to encourage them to be researchers and to go after knowledge and to use books to do it. Even, we do so much online, I like the fact that they've got that, you know, they know that they can get into a book in front of them. >>INTERVIEWER: Okay, great! Well, we have some paper work. >>ALLEN COLEMAN: Okay. Did I get off the subject a little bit too much? >>INTERVIEWER: No. Not at all. >>ALLEN COLEMAN: That was fun. You know, my daughter brought up that mermaid book the other night. I mean, she's gonna write something. She knows everything about mermaids. She found all the mermaid books and then she went online and we found together all the mermaid movies, so everything from Splash to H20, we watched it online before it ever came out! >>INTERVIEWER: That's amazing!