Teresa Kerr — better known to preschoolers and caregivers as Mrs. T — never has a shortage of children’s books on hand. That’s because for her, storytelling and literature is a lot more than a form of entertainment.
On Thursday (June 6), Kerr will be launching another season of “Story Time with Mrs. T” at Peterborough’s Silver Bean Café. Every Thursday at 10 a.m. all summer long, she will be stationed outside the waterfront café in Millennium Park with a stack of books, reading to preschoolers, young children, caregivers, and anyone else who wants to listen to her engaging storytelling.
“I always say that anybody is welcome,” says Kerr. “I think even adults would benefit or find more joy in their lives if somebody read to them more often.”
Kerr can’t remember a time she wasn’t immersed in stories and literature. Raised in a “print-rich household,” Kerr spent her childhood reading Curious George books, playing library with her sisters, and waiting in anticipation for her subscription of Walt Disney’s Comics to arrive in the mail.
“I remember the discovery of words and pronunciations, and the thrill of getting something to read in the mail or going to the library,” she says. “It opened up whole worlds.”
The passion led her to pursue Canadian literature throughout her undergraduate degree and spending much of her career working for the Hamilton Public Library in children’s services while raising her own children.
When she moved to Peterborough, Kerr worked in adult literacy as the executive director of the Trent Valley Literacy Association and was on the board at the Peterborough Public Library. But, still, she was looking for more.
“What I was missing in my life was something I had done in the past, which was doing story time with children,” she says. “I had an opportunity to do a lot of advocacy, even at the provincial level, but I missed that immediacy of the contact with the recipient.”
So she approached Silver Bean Café the winter before 2015 and, if it wasn’t for a hiatus during the pandemic, it would have been 10 years of Story Time with Mrs. T at the café this summer.
Not long after beginning at Silver Bean, Kerr — who also currently works part-time at Peterborough’s By the Books used book store — began leading regular story times at the Peterborough Public Library. There, she reads from French children’s books, drawing on her experience participating in an immersion program in Quebec during her studies, and having spent a year in France as a mother’s helper.
“I feel I could do a regular story time in my sleep, but with French it takes more preparation,” she says. “But I love it and I’m passionate about the French language, so I think it’s a great opportunity for children to experience outside the classroom — something that still brings in that element of something new and it can be fun.”
While creating a space of fun (and maybe some learning) is always the goal at Story Time with Mrs. T, Kerr also hopes it can show parents just how valuable it can be to introduce to children the love of reading.
“Books can be a toy or a tool,” Kerr points out. “If a parent has to take the kids across town to a doctor’s appointment, or if a child is having a breakdown in the grocery store, what can really help both the parent and the child is having a book to pull out, or taking a break to share a song or nursery rhyme that they both know. That can have a calming influence on the parent too, and it’s a way of reconnecting with the child and trying to provide some pleasure.”
She notes that during her career in literacy, there was a lot of research being done on how stress in infants and children can cause higher levels of the cortisol hormone, which can interfere with the child’s development.
“For the child to know they have an adult who’s paying attention to them, focusing on them, and speaking the same language — if you’re singing a song or playing with a toy, or looking at the pictures in a book together — that’ll make it a little more fun, and it’ll go better for both,” she says.
Over the many years she has been reading to young people, Kerr has noticed a change in the types of lessons and morals being explored within the stories she reads.
“Children’s literature always had moral tale to keep kids out of trouble back in the day,” she says. “Today it helps children understand and approach others with compassion instead of fear.”
But still, she notes, there is always something to be learned.
“Children’s books introduce you to topics and characters and situations you might not have experienced before in your own life, so I think it really broadens horizons,” Kerr explains.
“Many times a book helps children, and certainly the adults, to see things from somebody else’s point of view, and helps us realize that the other child in your class who doesn’t talk very much — for example — isn’t mean and unfriendly, but that they’re anxious and shy.”
Above all, she hopes to instill a life-long love of reading in children, no matter what that looks like.
Kerr shares that, while her adult children both followed in her footsteps with a passion for reading (her daughter is a primary school teacher and her son is a writer and editor), her daughter was always a “natural reader,” while her son was not so easily convinced and got “hooked” by reading the comics in the newspaper every morning.
For Kerr, this shows that every child will be drawn to different stories — but the important part is they are reading them.
“Whether it’s a comic book or a graphic novel or a magazine or instructions for a game or a recipe, it’s all reading,” she says. “It’s self-empowerment and it’s a wonderful thing for everybody.”
This story has been updated with a correction: Teresa Kerr’s daughter is a primary school teacher, not an early childhood educator.
