At one of the early Nebraska Growing Readers (NGR) events held at Educare Indian Hill, Janelle Nisssen describes parents whose “eyes welled up with tears.” She’s talking about the Eating at Educare book-signing, a story co-written by the facility’s cook Miss Belinda and Laura Cady, a story featuring other workers, teachers, and children at Indian Hill. Nissen, who is the Director of Educare Indian Hill, says, “watching the parents see themselves in the books; to see them and to see the children see themselves in the book was magical.”
Nissen has been involved with Nebraska Growing Readers since it began in 2023 when Laura Cady began working closely with Indian Hill as a test site for writing books and family engagement. Thanks to Nissen and Cady, it has since been a forerunner in hosting literacy events for the program. As Nissen puts it, “NGR hits our mission of that two-generational home-to-school connection as well as getting books in the home.” What Nissen is doing is building a literacy community, where connections between home and school, involvement of parents and children, events focused on books, unite not only the Educare community but also the local community around reading.
Educare Indian Hill was a Nebraska Children and Families Foundation Sixpence site and helped launch the Nebraska Growing Readers initiative, an event that hosted Nebraska’s First Lady Suzanne Pillen as an advocate of literacy and the work NGR is doing. Since then, Nissen has found creative ways to build community around literacy and has made NGR a core part of the effort.
She began with Books-n-Breakfast, where parents could stop in to have a bite to eat and to learn more about the program. She explains that this was important because initially there was a misconception about the program being a sort of library where books were borrowed. The Breakfast event allowed her to clarify that the books were free for families to take home and keep.
The first major and most impactful event, however, was the Eating at Educare signing, where, according to Nissen, everybody in the building got a copy of the book and where she said, “it was really exciting for them to see a book that actually took place in the classroom.” She went on to say, “we gave parents copies of the book, and they saw their children in there. That was just really powerful for them.” This is the kind of community building around literacy that Nissen believes in. She says that she likes to greet the parents in the morning and often encourages them to grab a book on their way out.
Nissen sees the NGR initiative as something she wants to take beyond her immediate educational setting to the local community. She says that at this time of year lots of families come in to fill out applications for the following year, and even though they may not be in her program ultimately, the families that come in with their child are told to grab a book, to take it home, and to keep it.
It is such a communal sense that drove Indian Hill’s next successful event, a book-bin decorating day. Nissen says that she had seen other early childhood professionals asking families to send in photos of where they kept their NGR books, but she wanted to take it a step further. Because many of her families are short on resources, she decided to provide bins and have the families work with their children to make a special place where they would always know to find their books. The day ended with kids filling their bins with favorite NGR books.
The most recent event highlighted the diversity of the community Educare Indian Hill serves. Located in South Omaha, many of the families are Spanish-speaking. In fact, one of the things Nissen says families have liked about the NGR initiative is the availability of books in Spanish. She says, that “when we have the same book in English and Spanish, they (the families) take one in both languages. They’ve appreciated that.” To celebrate that diversity, Indian Hill hosted a pupusa day to highlight the book My Mom is a Chef about one of the Educare’s own Salvadorian families. Vanessa Jovel, who is featured making her family pupusas in the book, helped hand out copies to families, and everyone at the Educare facility got to try different types of the popular Salvadorian food. It’s books like these that, as Nissen says, “represent the community we live in,” that celebrate it’s cultural traditions and language which “fly off the shelves a lot faster.”
Nissen says the sense of community has been powerful. Parents volunteer to stock the shelves with new books, which she sees as giving them ownership in the program. The opportunity they’ve had to publish books that represent the community has really brought them together as well. She describes parents who have come to her with simple but impactful book ideas, such as a book about adding a new sibling to your family or one on baby sign language.
The excitement about NGR comes in part, Nissen says, due to the ongoing nature of the initiative: “I’ve never worked with a partnership where we have this type of opportunity, this ongoing thing. Sometimes it’s just a one and done.” With that in mind, she is happy to see new elements of NGR, such as the incoming kindergarten student program, where children transitioning into kindergarten can receive free books in the mail. Nissen is excited to see how NGR grows and wants to continue to partner with the initiative.
What she knows for now is the magic of community building around literacy events. Parents are asking if they can take two copies of some of the locally published books so they can give one to Grandma. That’s the kind of generational impact she and NGR hope to make, the kind of impact she hopes will make for better literacy skills for the children with whom she works.
