By Mikayla van Loon
A special Mooroolbark story time session was hosted in Hookey Park on Tuesday to celebrate Cultural Diversity Week.
The Harmony Day event on 18 March brought families together of all languages, cultures and heritage to share in a universal joy: stories.
Mooroolbark Library’s children services manager Emma Wallis said for this year’s harmony day, the library wanted to focus on languages, to show “that your home language is just as important as the main language of Australia, which is English”.
“The theme of Harmony Day is always, everyone belongs. So we try really hard with our story time to represent all different cultures, all different people belonging together in harmony and showing respect and kindness to others,” she said.
“Our country’s made up of lots of different languages and it’s really important that our children, our future are growing up understanding that being multilingual or bilingual is really important as well.”
Children’s librarian Hanna Condon led the children in rhymes, songs and stories, in both English and with the help of a Hindi translator.
Chin dialect translators from LanguageLoop also sat with children and parents to translate the stories and songs as they were told and sung allowing everyone to join in.
All the promotional materials for the event were also translated into various languages to ensure community members could see the information in their own tongue.
Engaging with a number of services for the event as well, like Yarra Ranges Kinders, Cire Services, EACH, The Parents Hub, Yarra Ranges Council, Inspiro, Services Australia and the Toy Libraries, Emma said it was also a great opportunity for parents to see what other services are available in the community.
“(We’re) just making it really clear what’s available to our families, that most of it is free, and that we’re here to help as well because a lot of these services, we do find people still don’t realise are there.
“There’s so much information overload out there. So today’s also been a really good opportunity to come together and go, ‘this is what we offer, how we can help’ and I guess just making sure they feel like this is a safe space as well.”
Hanna said the planning for this event began months ago as a “joint effort” between the culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) network, the council and the library.
“I feel like we’ve all put our strength into the programme,” she said.
While stories and songs are a great way to connect and educate, Hanna said story time also provides an environment for every age from tiny tots, to toddlers and preschoolers, to begin being around other children in a sometimes noisy setting.
“Part of coming to story time is being comfortable, but also it really sets the children up well for later on at daycare, kinder, school, because story time is a loud environment, it can be quite overwhelming, and often they start as babies,” she said.
With other games set up, painting tables, playdough and a visit from a CFA fire truck, Emma and Hanna were so impressed with the turnout, the engagement in the activities and the conversations being had after the story time.
“People have really enjoyed it and we asked a lot of them today. We started at around 10.30 and we didn’t finish till nearly 11, we kept them sitting and listening for a good 25 minutes, and for them to be out here with all this distraction going on is a good measure for us,” Hanna said.
“It seems like people are really engaged. They’re not leaving. They all came here, and they’re staying around, and they’re actually moving around and chatting to everyone, which to me, is a really good sign that they’ve enjoyed it,” Emma said.
To find out more about regular story times visit, yourlibrary.com.au/storytimes or call Mooroolbark Library on 9800 6480.
