Former teacher opens children's bookstore in St. Pete

Kid-focused vibe at The Story Garden bookstore

FOX 13's Barry Wong takes us inside a new bookstore in St. Pete where the owner's main goal is to get kids to love books.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla - A former teacher missed reading books to students, so she created The Story Garden, where she can do just that.

"That was really my what I enjoyed most about teaching," The Story Garden owner Megan Kotsko said. "I missed helping children discover books and become readers and writers."

The backstory:

The Story Garden is a children's bookstore that opened in March. It features around 1,500 different books for kids up to 12 years old.

A couple times a week, Kotsko hosts "Play Me A Story" events, where she reads a couple of books to groups of younger kids.

"The idea being that we start with a story and really try to make it an immersive, engaging read aloud," Kotsko said.

The immersive part comes from kids asking questions and commenting on different pages and passing our props that help tell the story. Afterwards, the kids get to play at different stations tied to the books.

What they're saying:

"Kids learn through playing. We might read a story about the beach and sand and shells, and then we're playing in kinetic sand, and they're playing with the shells in the sand, so they're connecting, oh I just read about this, and now I'm touching, it feeling it, like I can feel like I'm in that story," parent Kayla Barkalow said.

Barkalow has taken her two kids, ages four and two, to a couple "Play Me A Story" events after reading about them online. After playtime, the kids inevitably want to take books home, and it's those books that Barkalow says they read the most.

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"I think for young kids, when you're introducing reading, like early literacy, that's huge," Barkalow said. "They need to be hands-on in playing."

For Kotsko, early literacy is always the goal. She smiles as she explains how important it is to read books to children, even newborns. As the kids grow older, she hopes they have built strong reading habits.

"Books can take you anywhere. It can take you on all these different journeys and expose you to different people, to different places," Kotsko said. "There's an incredible amount of learning and importance that goes into reading with children, and especially reading to children at a young age."

Click here to visit The Story Garden's website.

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