Little Kids’ Lit Flourishes With Ms. Sarah

Stories read to you, songs dedicated to you, and your very own name sung out loud with tuneful joy and welcome smiles while you play on a carpet of numbers, letters, and animals.

Hey, what could top that?

Well, towards the end, a multicolored parachute magically appears overhead and under it Ms. Sarah walks through with the purple bubble machine.

The Sarah in question is Sarah Quigley, the talented children’s librarian at the Mitchell Branch Library in Westville.

There on Tuesday morning 55 people — 29 entranced little kids and their 26 parents and other caregivers — gathered for the library’s weekly Stay and Play session.

“It’s definitely the place to be on Tuesday mornings,” said Sasha Lehrer, as she, along with other parents, stood to shake the parachute above their kids’ heads.

Lehrer said she has been a long-time regular at Stay and Play with her two kids, who are now four years and 18 months old.

“I also used to bring kids here when I babysat,” she added.

Quigley relocated from Texas to New Haven two years ago, and has a background both as a pre-school and high school teacher as well as in theater and stagecraft. Since she began her role at the library, the program has dramatically outgrown its original location in the community room near the library’s main entrance.

Now Stay and Play regularly fills the whole north end of Mitchell’s brightly lit rectangular space for two sessions every Tuesday morning, the first beginning at 10:00 and the second at 11:30.

On this Tuesday, the second session drew another 23 kids and their caregivers, Quigley reported, and there’s also a similarly popular session every third Saturday of the month at 11:00.

Creative programming for kids is flourishing across the branches of the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL) system and is a really important resource. 

That’s especially so for the parents of very young kids who are just getting the hang of it, and for whom the sessions are as much a pleasurable and useful networking experience.

For example Tessa and Jason Phillips, who live in the Hill, regularly bring their two-year-old Koyo and one-year old Sena to library programs that they hear of or research all across the city. They’ve utilized their nearby Wilson Branch and have been to a puppet event at the Stetson Branch Library in Dixwell, as well as to events in nearby towns, Jason said.

However, Stay and Play with ​“Miss Sarah,” as Tessa Phillips said her kids refer to Quigley, is unique. Her kids ask her about Miss Sarah, she said, and remind her, in their fashion, not to forget to take them.

“She genuinely loves kids,” Phillips said as Sena toddled out from her knees to explore the basket of books Quigley had put out in the middle of the carpet, and then back again.

“What’s in the story time box?” Quigley asked, and out came Moo Baa, a large picture book by Sandra Boynton, that teaches kids the sounds made by animals.

Regularly using sign language, and Spanish words, and making sure to individually address and make eye contact with as many of the little ones as possible, the group reading ensued. It combined the reading with gentle instruction for how to hold a book, what a cover is, where the beginning is, and the end.

That is, a kind of pre-reading curriculum goes on here, along with all the play and the fun.

Phillips also said, ​“The kids have made so many friends” through the sessions, and play dates have also followed.

The parents exchange tips with each other as well. ​“It’s a network,” she said.

And there was something else going on less obvious, but also important. 

This reporter noticed how throughout the 35 or 40 minutes of Stay and Play, the parents were not only observing their own kids and gauging, as young parents will, how they seemed to be interacting with other kids. They were also genuinely studying Quigley’s style, the magic of her interactions with the kids. 

Perhaps it was Quigley’s theatrical training that was kicking in or the musicality of her voice in the reading and in leading the singing, but these kids were really paying attention, even as they may have been toddling about, in the exploratory fashion of one, two, and three-year-olds. 

There was a ​“thereness” there, as Getrude Stein may have phrased it, as Quigley modeled how you not only read to and talk to a young child, but how you muster your own concentration to be genuinely present for them in their terms, how you enter their world. And as essential as that is, it’s often very hard to do.

“Sometimes parents apologize to me,” she said, that their kids aren’t paying attention. ​“But it’s appropriate, I tell them. They can wander or color on the tables [which surround the carpet area]. It all counts.”

Refugees from the less tolerant spaces she experienced in Texas, Quigley said that she and her wife, who also works in the NHFPL system, interviewed all around Connecticut but felt immediately at home in New Haven and embraced both by the city and the library and its commitment to diversity.

“I sometimes have to pinch myself that we’re in such a community of joy and belonging,” she said.

With her background as a teacher, a stage manager, and after re-training as a librarian, ​“I do feel this is what I was born to do. Being with kids, being silly, I just have the best job in the world.”

After the session Quigley says she will compile a regular email of the stories read at the session and a playlist of the songs. This practice happened organically, she said, as more and more families asked for it. ​“It’s perfect as we’re building pre-reading early literacy.”

Click here for all the Stay and Play story and reading session schedules across the library system.

Meanwhile, over at the main check-out desk, Sasha Lehrer was talking out A Pocket Full of Rocks and Raindrops to Rainbows, two picture books for her little ones. They had just finished playing for another half hour in the program room, where Quigley had set up toys and games and Lehrer and many of the other families had lingered.

It was about 11:15. Next up was going home, maybe read the books, then lunch and nap time.