by Brittany Burns, Children's Services Specialist, April 2022
One day we love to celebrate in Children’s Services is El Día de los Niños or El Día de los Libros, which translates to Children’s Day or Children’s Book Day. This is a great day where we celebrate children and their hopes and interests.
El Día de los Niños has a few goals, including connecting children to the world of learning, helping develop their cognitive and literacy skills in collaboration with their native language and culture, connecting families with local resources, and acknowledging culture, language, and heritage as ways to strengthen the family and the community. Children are our future, and El Día de los Niños is a way of celebrating that. El Día de los Niños started in 1925 when a World Conference for the Well Being of Children in Geneva, Switzerland decided a day was needed to focus on children. After the conference, many different countries picked a different day to celebrate. Many countries in South and Central America picked April 30th. In 1996, author Pat Mora was doing an interview and heard about El Día de los Niños. She was shocked as she had never heard of Día before and had nothing similar. Afterwards, Mora decided this was an important day that needed to be recognized and immediately got to work on making that happen. The first celebrations were in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas but spread quickly in the coming years. Now, schools, libraries, and whole towns put together events every year to celebrate El Día de los Niños.
This year, we are celebrating El Día de los Niños on April 29 during our Story Time Outside. We will have stories, songs, and crafts. We include bilingual stories and use it as a chance to improve our young patrons’ literacy skills, just as the original creators of this day intended. Register for Story Time Outside and join us on the side lawn of the library to discover all the fun we will have!