Margaret Nilles’ job was reading stories for and introducing books to the children at Homewood’s Willow School. She was happy to find the latest Jory John book for the youngest readers in pre-kindergarten or the chapter books about sports, dinosaurs and adventure characters for the second graders.
Classes would come to the library for 30 minutes. The first 15 minutes was Nilles’s time to read a story to the children. She kept a list of each story she read going back to 2017. It helped her avoid a repetition for a class that may have heard the story earlier in their time at Willow.
“I love the kids, I love what I do and that’s going to be the hard part,” she said days before walking away from her job. “I’m ready to move on to the next chapter of my life. Let the next generation come.”
Nilles has always been around young children and books. Twenty-seven years ago, she came to District 153 as a substitute teacher for two years before accepting a full-time position at Churchill School.
Originally her job was in the learning center, but that really was just a different name for the library. She worked there as an assistant. In 2014, Nilles moved to Willow and took over the library duties.
It wasn’t until three years ago that Willow got a designated library room children could visit. Before that Nilles was using a cart to take books around to the classrooms. She would load her cart with a wide variety of books. She would try to coordinate with teachers if they were doing a specific topic, such as when the second graders study construction. And she always coordinated her reading selections with special months, like Black History Month, or special occasions, like Halloween and Valentine’s Day.
“They love transportation and cars and sports and cheerleading and gymnastics and all that,” Nilles said.
She decorated the library with themes such as fairy tales, superheroes, camping. Several shelves has character dolls from the kids favorite books.
The librarian always had a plan for how to spend Willow’s share of the Illinois Public School Library Grant that is meant to help schools purchase books that promote diversity and social/emotional learning.
Several years ago Nilles did an inventory of the books at Willow and found the average age of materials was 19 years.
“I made it my mission, my goal to provide our current population with (diverse) books that are more geared to what our current population is,” she said. The library had books about African Americans, but they were all historical. There was nothing current about the materials and Nilles wanted students to “see themselves in these stories,” so got rid of the old materials and brought in new books.
She also did a good amount of research to not only keep up with what’s new in the juvenile reading world, but also how to encourage young readers to take an interest in having and reading a book.
What Nilles found is young children need to see a book. A traditional library shelves books vertically and titles and authors are listed on the spine of the book. But Willow School has children who are as young as 4 years old. They are just learning to read, so Nilles switched many of the books to dynamic shelving.
Putting books in clear bins makes it easy for the preschoolers, kindergarteners, and first graders to see a cover that invites them to read the story. The second graders have many of their books in the traditional vertical positions.
Nilles recognized that “it’s very overwhelming when you introduce 5-year-olds to something that’s like this” so she set aside part of the library as the “kindergarten corner” where they sit on a mat for her story reading and choose books from shelves in that area.
Nilles hopes she’s instilled a love of reading in the young children. She encourages them to pick a book each week.
“I feel like I made this library into a true grade school library for the kids here,” she said.
