Helsinki City Library’s services for early childhood and pre-primary education

Story hours immerse children in the world of stories, promoting their desire to read. They develop imagination, emotional skills and vocabulary. Times and registration information for the story hours can be found at Kultus.fi.(Link leads to external service)

Media hours combine stories and books with a media element and teach the participants about coding and different media applications, for example. Times and registration information for the media hours can be found at Kultus.fi.(Link leads to external service)

Libraries also offer other, guided group visits for ECEC groups as allowed by their resources. The local libraries of daycare centres communicate about their services directly by email to the daycare centres. Information about the services can also be found at Kultus.fi.(Link leads to external service) 

Would you and your group like to focus on a certain theme with the help of children’s literature? Libraries allow you to order a book bag focused on the theme specified by you for your daycare centre(Link leads to external service)(in Finnish).

Please note that the book bags for schools and daycare centres cannot be picked up from Oodi. You cannot order book packages for pickup at a mobile library using the order form. Book package orders to be picked up from the mobile library must be made via email: kirjastoautot@hel.fi(Link opens default mail program).

Helmet libraries want to encourage groups of children from daycare centres to have shared reading sessions with the help of a story diploma. The story diploma is granted after listening to or reading ten (10) books. Progress can be tracked by colouring in the books read by the group on the fun Reading Gull template. The groups that have completed the diploma can get a printed library diploma. 

The story diploma page(Link leads to external service) has a book list that offers a range of entertaining book suggestions for the shared reading sessions, as well as indicative age recommendations. Books can also be freely chosen from outside the list. The diploma is available in Swedish, Finnish, English and Russian. The story diploma can also be used to support the language spoken at the child’s home, so the books can be in any language. The suggested book list has the option of searching for different language versions of the books in the library collections.

More information about the story diploma is available at all Helmet library locations.

Daycare centre groups are very welcome to visit Central Library Oodi. Oodi offers groups both guided sessions and materials to support unguided visits. More information about the services is available on Oodi’s website.(Link leads to external service)

During the school year, a mobile library regularly visits daycare centres that have a long or difficult trip to the nearest library. The schedules are usually drawn up for one year at a time. The contact details for mobile libraries are available here: Libraries and opening hours | helmet.fi(Link leads to external service), and the schedule is here: Helsinki mobile library – Helmet-articles(Link leads to external service) (in Finnish).

You can get a shared library card for a group. The card can be issued when visiting the library. The ID of the person assigned as the card’s contact person is needed for making the card. The contact person ensures that the library card is used appropriately and that the loans are renewed and returned on time. The card will remain valid for a year. The loans on the group card will not be sent to debt collection, and the contact person is not personally liable for the material checked out with this library card.  

The Junior Activist Diploma(Link leads to external service)  encourages children and young people, families, and school classes to take action for the environment. The diploma offers inspiration for different ways of taking action and making an impact – let’s be brave together!    

Bedtime story shelf
We will pilot the bedtime story shelf service in two service areas in the spring of 2025. After this, we will make an assessment of whether we can offer bedtime story shelves in daycare centres in Helsinki. This means that, at the moment, it is not possible to have bedtime story shelves in other daycare centres than those included in the pilot.