By Eusebia Milanes, library associate, and Carrie Banks, senior supervising librarian, Brooklyn Public Library
The Child’s Place for Children with Special Needs at Brooklyn Public Library recently began its first bilingual English/Spanish programming at the Sunset Park and Red Hook Libraries. Club Nuestro Jardin (Our Garden Club) is a literature-based gardening program for children with and without disabilities begun in 1999 monolingually at the Flatlands Library. Each program includes reading aloud, music, movement, discussion and gardening. It is a fun, multi-sensory program that is based on multiple intelligences and universal design principals. The fact than none of these urban children have gardening experience provides a level playing field for those with and without disabilities.
The first meetings of Club Nuestro Jardin, took place at Sunset Park and Red Hook during the month of April 2010. 21 children and 11 adults participated in the two opening events. The gardens were weeded, planted and watered. At Sunset Park, the children even wrote songs for the plants! Since then, 10 to 12 children attend each program every week along with three to four parents; extra sessions have been added to meet demand. We meet many of the children and their families while doing outreach. One six-year old with autism and her father have been attending Our Garden Club at Sunset Park for several weeks. K. has limited language and uses a wheel chair, but she has added garden, water and flowers to her vocabulary. She cannot water the plants with the watering can, but she is able to use a spray bottle to spray them. K. is all smiles and so is her father. He keeps saying, “Thank you” and, “K. loves gardening.”
Club Nuestro Jardin is part of a multi-faceted initiative to reach children with disabilities and their families in the Spanish-speaking communities of Brooklyn. In partnership with several early intervention and preschool education programs, we provide early literacy workshops for families, each year, reaching at least 50 Spanish-speaking families of children with disabilities. This fall and winter we will be offering more workshops in Spanish than ever before. Topics such as special education services, behavior management and learning disabilities will be covered, among others, in partnership with social service agencies. We are confident that these programs will succeed thanks in large part to the success of Club Nuestro Jardin, which has reaffirmed Brooklyn Public Library as a valuable community resource for Spanish-speaking children with disabilities and their families to Brooklyn Public Library, where they know they will find what they need. For more information or a copy of the gardening club curriculum, contact Carrie Banks at c.banks@brooklynpubliclibrary.org.