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09/19/2018 08:30 AMEmily Jenkins always knew she wanted to work with kids, but it took her a while to figure out just how she wanted to do it.
“I started my career as a preschool teacher because that’s what I thought I wanted to do,” Emily says.
She earned an associate’s degree in early childhood education and taught in Hamden, but learned that teaching preschool was in fact not what she wanted to do.
“I realized that I could do more for kids if I were in a different situation,” she says. “I’ve always loved kids, always wanted to have children, wanted to work with children, so I thought naturally I would be a preschool teacher…but just found that there was a lot of difficulty with that from the administrative standpoint.”
The position did have its rewarding moments, however.
“Reading the books to the kids, sitting down and really getting into the characters and making silly voices and having the kids laugh and reading things that I had loved as a kid to these kids, that was my favorite part of the day,” she says.
She took a break from teaching, but she still hadn’t decided what she would do next. That came when she had just finished a book borrowed from the library and headed out to a bookstore to immediately start on the next book in the series.
Her future husband John teased her, saying, “Jeez, why don’t you just become a librarian?”
“It was like something clicked…I never thought of it as a career, I never thought of it as anything anybody did. So I found out what I had to do. I enrolled, I went back to school,” she says.
Even after earning her master’s degree in information management from Southern Connecticut State University, Emily still didn’t know how working with kids would fit into her new career path.
“I had such a negative experience being a preschool teacher that I thought for sure I was going to be an adult reference librarian,” she said.
Then, a position opened up in Berlin for a children’s librarian and Emily decided to apply just to get her foot in the door so she could move up to the adult position she thought she wanted.
“The minute I started [working as a children’s librarian], I loved it,” she says. “There’s more freedom in it. You’re with this group of children for 45 minutes to an hour and you can have as much fun as you want.”
The job at the Berlin library allowed her to do her favorite part of the preschool job with more time to herself in between. She worked full time there for a year before coming to the North Haven Library in 2015 to be the children’s librarian.
She found that the freedom of the job, coupled with the people with whom she worked, made being a children’s librarian more fun than being a preschool teacher.
“Moms are great. They’re so supportive,” she says. “They want to interact with their kids.”
Emily and John have a two-year-old, John IV, who, they call “Ivy” after the Roman numerals that follow his name. Her son takes up a lot of Emily’s reading time.
“Most of what I’m reading now is Curious George and truck books,” she says. “I don’t read a ton with too much substance because life has a ton of substance.”
The library has officially wrapped up its summer reading program, including a new program for birth to three-year-olds called the Rubber Ducky Club.
“The concept is to promote early literacy more than anything else,” Emily says.
The “reading list” would include activities like singing the ABCs or dancing to a music CD—things meant to help young kids learn to associate words with sounds to prepare them for reading—not just reading books.
With summer coming to a close, the children’s section of the library is moving into its yearly programming including story time for kids form birth to 18 months every Thursday at 10:30 a.m. and for 18- to 36 month-olds starting in October on Wednesdays at the same time.
October will feature several programs aimed at gearing kids up for their scarecrow contest. The Monday, Oct. 1 painting club will be scarecrow-oriented and there will be a special scarecrow design program on the Wednesday, Oct. 3 for 6- to 12 year olds.
“A lot of what we’re doing in October is special programming because we love Halloween,” Emily says. “I think everybody that works in the children’s library is a little bit of a child at heart.”