After several months of teaching myself new approaches to storytimes, I’m finally hitting my stride with both the Toddler and Infant storytimes.  It’s taken a lot of hard work, and I’ll admit to getting myself fairly worked up and stressed out about these two storytimes in the early months, but I’ve managed to find my own rhythm for each.

I’m still using Storytimes for Two Year Olds by Judy Nichols as my starting point for the toddler storytimes.  Nichols’ book contains a huge amount of useful information, suggestions, activities, and book suggestions, but she masterfully leaves enough room for the reader to add his or her own personality and ideas.  As I’ve become comfortable with the format and the age group, I’ve started to make each storytime my own.  Rather than depend on Nichols’ book suggestions (most of which are not in my library’s collection), I’ve found books that are in our collection that work beautifully with toddlers.  Instead of always using her suggested fingerplays and songs, I’ve pulled in some from Hugh Hanley’s collection that are more fun and less forced.

And, most importantly, I’ve mastered the art of using the flannelboard to tell stories.  Last week I premiered my masterpiece (so far, hopefully there will be more masterpieces to come): a full set of flannelboard figures for Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle.  It took me several hours to complete the figures, but they’re pretty fantastic, and the kids loved the story when it was told in that graphic format.  Happily, too, I had the foresight to make the figures on my own time, with my own supplies, so they belong to me and not to the library, and can go with me wherever my future might take me.  Wise, wise, wise – I left far too many materials behind when I left my last job.

And Betsy Diamant-Cohen’s Mother Goose on the Loose curriculum has made the infant storytimes a breeze.  Now that I’ve been using the MGOL format for a few months, I’m finding that the kids and parents who regularly attend are relishing MGOL’s predictable repetition, and we are having a real blast together.  And Jennifer has started up a Wednesday morning session of MGOL, which hopefully will build and grow just as the Tuesday session has. 

Now that I’ve reached a level of comfort with these two storytimes, and now that I’ve built up a library of materials and lesson plans, I feel like I can relax more and enjoy each storytime more than before.  And, I’m left with more free mental energy to use for ordering books.  It’s all good, all very positive.

My ego took a major beating this morning.  Major.  During today’s “Mother Goose on the Loose” program, there was one child who kept crying – not constantly crying, but intermittently crying.  Head down on the floor, hands over the ears, absolutely miserable crying.  About half-way through the storytime, I realized that she only cried when I was singing.  When I was reading a story, or doing a fingerplay, she still looked a bit grumpy and out of sorts, but she didn’t cry.  As soon as I started singing, she’d wail in agony.

Of course, I do think there was more going on here than just my singing:  the child was about four years old, far older than the other kids attending, and she had to share her mother with her little brother who is about a year old.  And, she just gave off the vibe of being generally cranky and “off” today (mom’s exasperation was palpable).  I’m guessing that she’s probably coming down with a cold or the stomach bug that has ravaged the town.

But even figuring these factors in, her crying made me very conscious of my singing for the first time in quite a while.  I’ve gotten to the point that I just go ahead and sing during my storytimes, without pausing to think about how dreadful I probably sound, and as a result my storytimes have become pretty fun and fairly popular.  If I’m not self-conscious, I can allow myself to have fun.  If I have fun, everyone else seems to follow suit.  Today, though, I had a few minutes of awkwardness as I paid total attention to myself and my performance. 

Luckily, I was able to let it go after those few minutes, and soon I was singing again with gusto.  Sure, my singing stinks, but I haven’t heard any of the moms who sing like angels, either.  Perfect voices are not what infant storytimes are all about.