the national medal for Museum and Library Services is the nation's highest
honor for libraries and museums that are serving their communities in exceptional
ways Long Island children's museum director Suzanne LeBlanc and community
members Francisco and Ruth kada traveled to Washington from Garden City New York
to receive the national medal and spoke to Y imls about how the museum impacts
the community the Long Island children's museum was founded by a group of parents
who were really um concerned about having a highquality children's museum
they consciously called it Long Island children's museum so that they were
would consider they were serving the whole all of Long Island but also from
the beginning it was very important to them to serve a broad range of people
both culturally economically to be a place a community Gathering Place where
everyone could come together we were looking around for a program where we
can put our son and we found out about hunos alinder in Long Island well the
Long Island children's museum from its beginning has had a commitment to be
this community Gathering Place and to serve a broad range of people and we
believe that the kinds of programs that we do for the community like hunto Sal
Kinder make us a really important anchor in the community it's ages of four years
four years old uh one of the things is that um they help the kids to um get
ready for for a school and one of the things that they learn how uh to write
their names how to relate with other kids how to cheer with them qutool
Kinder uh runs primarily in the summertime and we have 20 kids who come
for a month every day and they have um everything you would do in a preschool
we send the buses to pick them up so they learn how to leave home and on the
bus right and uh we have a staff person on the bus with them and they come into
the museum they use the museum as a classroom for every four or five
children we have a teacher bilingual teachers they help the kids and our own
language and at the same time they're teaching English and that's one of the
Beautiful Things the parents come for half a day a week part of what we do in
the parents class and it's taught in their language of origin is to um what's
different about the school system here what are the expectations here of you as
a parent how to um help support their children's
education at the Museum we learned uh first of all how to help our
kids to do the homework we learned uh the rules um how to do the homework how
have the own place not bouncing around just have one own place to do the
homework uh we used to have Francisco junor with us all the time until we go
to sleep and we learned at hunto program that uh he had to have time to go to
sleep um we learned that have to go to sleep at
8:00 and uh how to treat them better how to have patience with them which is very
important it's the mission of all the community programs is to really assist
people in um whatever they need to be more successful as parents in particular
as families and as citizens of the world