Category Archives: Storytime

Etc., Spare time - Culture, Storytime

Weekend update

I’m not feeling too possessed by the writing bug this weekend, due to YET ANOTHER oral surgery on Friday (don’t even get me started – this has been a pretty miserable experience), but thought I’d update on a couple of things I’ve written about recently:

Pippa is a happy girl, now that she’s back on regular food.  She does drink a lot of water, and she does sleep more than she used to, but she’s enjoying all the extra lap time and morning brushing sessions.  Hopefully she’ll be around for a long time yet.

The mouse is dead, finally.  And I have learned that my perfectionism doesn’t work well when setting mouse traps; I was so focused on making the traps look good that they were virtually impossible to spring.  The mouse enjoyed many snacks of spreadable cheese and peanut butter off of my traps, in absolute safety and comfort.  But then Jim set a trap, and that was the end of mousey.  Mouse did leave us one parting gift, though – he climbed into the sub-woofer for our (thankfully) inexpensive surround sound system, and it would seem that he munched through some wires while he was in there.  Now when we try to use the surround sound we get horrible loud sounds and the system goes into “protect” mode.  And yes, I have unplugged it.  Time to save our pennies for a new system…

Work on the bathroom continues on, slowly but surely.  Jim laid down the remainder of the tiles this morning, all those fussy little pieces that require cutting and fitting and delicate maneuvering into small spaces.  One step closer, one step closer.

So that’s the weekend update for today.  And one plea for those of you who will be attending my storytimes this week: remember that I’ve got another open wound in my mouth, and that I can’t talk very loud, and I’ll probably cut down the length of each storytime this week to spare myself some misery.  And, most importantly, the swelling and bruises on my face are NOT from my wonderful husband!!

Book groups, Storytime

No storytime today

6 Comments

I’ve come down with a yucky cold, and have decided that I should keep myself home this morning instead of infecting my coworkers and the storytime children.  So no storytime today, my apologies; but I’m guessing everyone would rather miss one storytime than get a cold in the midst of this already miserable winter.

I will be in for this afternoon’s Skype visit with Ellen Potter, being very careful not to spread my germs to the fifth graders in the book group.  (Luckily, the author won’t be susceptible to my germs!)  Until then, though, I think I’d better take a nice long nap.  Achoo.  Hack hack hack.  Sound of kleenex being used.  I hate colds.

Library events, Storytime

Saturday Storytimes

For several years now we have had teen volunteers running weekly storytimes at the library on Saturday mornings.  The teens are all excellent storytellers, brimming with joy and enthusiasm, and for most of those several years, there has been good attendance at the storytimes.  And then this year, the year of the Unseen Preschooler, hit.  My Thursday afternoon preschool storytime, formerly an in-demand event, has been so quiet that you can hear crickets – so quiet that I’ve gotten rid of this Thursday afternoon storytime and replaced it with a couple of preschool storytimes scattered through the month on various experimental days and times.  And the Saturday Storytimes?  No preschoolers have been showing up, not for a couple of months now, leaving the teen volunteers to read to each other. 

So Jennifer had a great idea, which we instituted as of this month:  one or two special themed Saturday Storytimes each month.  This month, the teens will be doing a Dr. Seuss storytime on January 15, and a Princess storytime on January 29.  I’ve printed out some colorful posters and mailed them to all the preschools and placed them all over the children’s room, and parents are noticing.  I’ll be picking up some crowns for the teens to wear at the Princess storytime, and M. promises that she’ll wear her rainbow socks to read at the Dr. Seuss storytime – and if Lisa finds her Cat in the Hat hat, then one teen can wear that, too.

With any luck, we’ll have some excited listeners for these terrific teen readers on the 15th and 29th – if you’re reading this post and have a preschooler, please do come to one or both storytimes!  And remember…someday your preschooler will be a teen, and that teen will be wanting an audience for their volunteer gig reading at the library…and you’ll be wishing that some preschoolers will show…it’s all cyclical, after all.

Storytime

Mini baby boom

Last year, the Infant Storytimes were full to bursting, with up to 40 adults and kids attending each of three separate storytimes each week.  In a very small town, mind you.  The Storytime for 2’s & 3’s, on the other hand, was small to miniscule, with sometimes frustratingly low enrollment. 

This year, the Infant Storytime has calmed down significantly, but the Storytime for 2’s & 3’s keeps growing…and growing…and growing.  In a great example of how libraries must always be fluid and flexible with their programming, I’ve decided to eliminate the Wednesday morning Infant Storytime and replace it with at least one (perhaps two, we’ll see) Storytime for 2’s & 3’s, which will be in addition to the 2 sessions of 2 & 3 year old storytime that is already taking place on Monday mornings.

One challenge in dealing with this mini baby boom of mostly two year olds is that the format of the Infant Storytime is significantly different from the format of the 2 & 3 year old storytime.  The younger storytime is a drop-in format, and quite active and loose in terms of behavior expectations.  No child under the age of two can be expected to sit completely still for a whole forty five minutes, and thus the only behavior rule in that storytime is that children cannot cross the once invisible, now visible (long story) line that runs across in front of me and my storytime supplies.  Gradually, as they get older, the kids in this youngest storytime learn how to be in a group, and by the time they reach the age of two they’re ready for a new challenge.

Which is why the struture of the Storytime for 2’s & 3’s is very different.  It is theme-based, and much more instructional and storyteller-focused.  The kids are expected to stay in the laps of their caregivers, and to be attentive to the stories and fingerplays.  There are still many interactive segments, and the kids do get to have some activity mid-way through the storytime, but in general this storytime feels much more like a class, and, indeed, I’m trying to accomplish more direct teaching of concepts in this storytime.  Obviously, this storytime is much shorter than the infant storytime, since the demands are higher on the children, and this storytime is only twenty to twenty-five minutes.

In order for the Storytime for 2’s & 3’s to succeed, though, I do require pre-registration, and I do limit the number of pre-registrants to twelve children per session.  Ideally, the number would be only ten, but it’s unrealistic to expect perfect attendance from all families each week, so I bumped the number up to twelve.  Only one problem this fall:  we ended up with sixteen children in the first session and fourteen in the second.  Yikes.  It’s incredible the difference that those extra bodies have made in the room.  With more bodies crammed (yes, indeed, crammed) into the story room, the children are much more distracted and much less at ease than they tend to be in a smaller group.  I haven’t been able to do many of the coolest parts of my lesson plans, because there are simply too many children and the cumulative attention level is far lower than I would like.

So, the solution is:  add one more, or perhaps two more sessions of this storytime (I know there are a lot more children who are on the cusp of turning two and will be eligible for this storytime come January).  I’ll ask for volunteers to switch to the new time(s), and if that doesn’t work, I’ll hold a totally democratic lottery.  I think that once the group size has been diminished, the parents attending will be truly astonished at the difference in their children’s attention span and at how much their children are able to take away from each storytime.  And, of course, I’ll have much more fun presenting the storytime, too.  My boss has asked if it’s too much on my plate to be doing this, and I keep reassuring her that it’s not – that I’ll enjoy the process infinitely more if the groups are smaller.  And there’s also a lot to be said for me repeating the presentation of a storytime, since practice does make perfect, and no practice is better than the practice in front of an actual group.  (Which is a good reason to switch to the Wednesday group!)

The official time slot request papers will be available starting on the morning of December 13 at that day’s Storytime for 2’s & 3’s.  Once all papers have been submitted, I’ll review them and see how the groups work out, and whether we will need to resort to a lottery.  I have a feeling that it will all be ok, though, and that the groups will form naturally and happily via the time slot request sheets…

Librarianship, Storytime

On puppets

4 Comments

While watching The Muppet Movie last night, I was reminded of how great an influence Jim Henson and his compatriots have had on me.  I learned all of my puppet skills from them – and from my older brother and sister – and those skills are one of the most important tools in my children’s librarian toolbox.  Not something you’d think to put on a resume (“Puppet skills: Consistently and competently emulate the Muppets when using puppets”), nor ask about when interviewing a candidate for a children’s librarian position (“That’s great that you have an MLS and ten years of experience, but can you use puppets???”), yet those puppet skills are completely and totally essential to the success of any children’s librarian.  If you can’t use puppets well in a storytime, it means that you’re maintaining too much of your adult ego, and you’re not really living in the moment and letting go – letting things flow.

Which is not to say that I’m perfect at it, because I’m definitely not.  But there are those days, or even just moments, when I bring out a puppet in storytime and forget about Abby and simply focus on the puppet, like I would if I were horsing around with my brother and sister and puppets.  In those moments, something magical truly does happen.  I can see out of the corner of my eyes that the adults, as well as the kids, are transfixed and amused and caught up in the puppet performance.  The irony, of course, is that as soon as I am aware of the audience’s reaction – then I lose the moment.  It’s much like meditation:  you’ll be going along great, meditating really well, and then you realize, “Hey, I’m doing this meditation thing great today!  I’ve totally forgotten about everything else!!!”, and guess what?  You’re not meditating anymore.

But I’m hoping that with more practice I’ll reach that perfect level…puppet nirvana, maybe…and that I’ll be able to sustain my puppeteering for longer periods of time, while being truly conscious of the performance.  That would be awesome.  For now, I’m just happy that I’ve been using puppets more in the Mother Goose on the Loose Storytime.  Instead of using only stuffed animals for the song “When the [hen] gets up in the morning, she always says [cluck],” I’ve started using a rotating selection of puppets, too, and it’s been incredibly cool.  The stuffed animals are very cute, but also static.  The puppets, on the other hand, are animated and engaging: the moms who are chatting at the back of the room stop chatting, and the children who are getting wiggly stop wiggling.  Everyone looks at the goat puppet as I sing to him, and everyone maaas along with him, with some happy giggles here and there in the room.  Best of all are the Folkmanis stage puppets, which have truly malleable faces like Muppets; my favorite stage puppet is the horse, which has quarts of personality, but the lion and the sheep are a close second.

And all this thinking about puppets has inspired me to learn a story to tell with puppets for Thursday’s Preschool Storytime.  It’s not often that I have the time available to memorize a story to tell with puppets, but this week I’m going to make the time (at home, I’m afraid – there’s never the time to do this at work) and Thursday’s storytime is going to be fun.  Puppets rule!!

Book groups, Cats Dogs Plants Animals, Storytime, Teens, Young adult book review

Week in review

1 Comment

It was a crazy busy week (my favorite kind), with lots of attendees at the three infant storytimes, some book ordering, the first fall meeting of the Teen Book Group, and a bit of light at the end of my work tunnel.

Attendance at the infant storytime (for which I use the Mother Goose on the Loose curriculum) continues to be very strong, which makes me happy.  I love seeing my old friends who are growing up (some have even graduated to the Storytime for 2’s & 3’s) and also meeting all of the new friends who have found the storytime.  On Tuesday we smashed a record: the youngest storytime attendee EVER!  This baby girl, younger sibling to two storytime regulars, came for her first storytime at the tender age of five days old.  That’s right, five days old.  She is very, very cute, and her older siblings are sweet as ever and seem to be handling their new sister with great grace.

On Monday, we began the day with a sad note, as Susan and I arrived in the morning to find a dead bird lying on the ground next to the front door of the library.  Joanne, our in-house intrepid animal patrol person (Joanne has NO fear – she blows me away with her fearlessness) wasn’t due in until the afternoon, so Susan and I looked at each other, and I said that I would take care of the bird.  Using a snow shovel and a guide for voters, I scooped the bird up and placed it in the garden area behind the stone benches.  It was a very, very pretty little bird, and not a species that I recognized.  When Joanne came in for work later, we told her about the bird, and I took her out to see it.  She thought it was a type of thrush, and ended up taking the bird’s body home to identify it.  Turns out it was a Swainson’s Thrush, which Joanne told me are currently migrating.  We figure it hit one of the large windows and died upon impact.  Very sad, but what a pretty little bird.

On Tuesday, the Teen Book Group met, minus several members who had field hockey or soccer games, and discussed a book I chose for them, Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. Though it is a good book, it’s not a great book, and only one of the teens finished reading it (the rest of them read about half of the book).  But there was a little bit of method in my madness of choosing this book: I had just read the book for my own edification, and decided I’d give myself a bit of a break by choosing a book to discuss that I’d actually already read; and, more importantly, I was hoping to inspire the teens to come up with some book suggestions of their own.  My earlier email pleas for book suggestions had disappeared into the ether, with no response, so I figured that if I chose a fairly good book for the October meeting, but not a great book, that the teens would decide to help me out with some titles of books that they actually want to read and discuss.  The trick was that the book had to be good enough to get them to come to the meeting, but not good enough for them to trust me to choose the books for the rest of the year.  Sneaky, huh?  It worked, too – we have enough book suggestions to last us through the summer.  But I don’t want to discourage anyone from reading Mortal Engines, because it is a good read, best for a more mature reader (translation: adults will like this book more than teens) and for someone who really likes science fiction and is willing to try out a bit of steampunk. 

The week was also successful in other ways, as I work to get caught up after being out for those many days.  The Cultural Council grant application is finished, a bunch of books have made their way down to Susan for processing, and an order for new books has been placed.  My desk is as clean as it gets, storytimes are planned out for the next four weeks, my first class visit has been scheduled, and the feeling of panic has subsided down to the usual stressed-but-ok feeling.  Phew.  And now, with a long weekend ahead, I’m planning to make some feltboard stories…and to enjoy the gorgeous weather that has finally arrived.

Blog administration, Librarianship, Library events, Storytime

Reapproaching normal…

4 Comments

After this long blog hiatus, I’m finally feeling like I’m reapproaching normal (though I’m sure my two siblings will argue that I’ve never been normal…), and it seems like a new blog entry is in order. 

August and early September were a bit tough for me, and that’s all that I’ll say here, but since returning to work on September 7 I’ve been working hard and getting myself caught up.  I have lots of goals for myself this year, some of them my “official” goals for my annual review, others just things that I’d personally like to accomplish:

  • I’ve been creating all new lesson plans and feltboard stories for my Toddler Storytime, so that I can feel more excited about the storytime myself, and hopefully pass that excitement on to the kids and their parents.  I’ve also renamed this storytime, since it turns out that the word “toddler” has negative connotations for parents of three-year-olds; by the time a child is three, a parent no longer thinks of him or her as a toddler, though the age combination of two and three year olds in this storytime has been fantastic.  The two year olds are just learning the drill, the three year olds are serving as role models for the younger kids while gaining in confidence themselves.  It’s a really wonderful age grouping, and I decided that the name of the storytime needed to be less limiting – so it has been renamed, rather blandly perhaps, but descriptively, the “Storytime for 2’s & 3’s.”
  • All those new lesson plans for the Storytime for 2’s & 3’s have inspired me to create some new feltboard stories for exclusive use in the Preschool/Pre-K storytime.  These kids LOVE feltboard stories, and I realized that I need to be using feltboard stories every week with them, rather than every third week as I had been doing.  And, while the feltboard stories that I use for the younger group serve well for the kids ages four and up, the older kids deserve to have some feltboard stories of their very own.  I’ve created a list of books that will translate well to felt, and now I’m going to chip away at creating new feltboard stories on the weekend (as always, in my own time, with my own materials, so that the feltboard creations belong to me and not the library). 
  • With my library director’s enthusiastic blessing, I’ve created a new once-monthly Scrabble Club, inspired by the many, many other libraries in the country who already run successful Scrabble Clubs.  Our first meeting is on a Saturday afternoon in mid-October, open to all ages and all ability levels, and I’m really, really excited about it.  Hopefully there are enough Scrabble enthusiasts in town to get this program rolling, and to sustain it for a long time.
  • Jennifer and I got inspired recently, and rearranged the children’s room, moving the Advanced Reader collection (for grades 5 & 6 and up) to a corner location in the high-stacks section of the children’s room.  This collection was starting to outgrow its original spot in the center, low-stacks portion of the children’s room, so a move was necessary, though labor and sneeze intensive.  A nice side benefit of this move is that the Juvenile fiction collection, now located in that center section, is receiving more attention and more traffic that it did previously.  And another nice side benefit was that a lot of shelves got dusted in the course of the shift.  (We won’t talk about the asthma attack that came later…dust mask next time!)

Of course, these four items are but a few of the things that I’ve been working on this past month, but they are the most interesting and notable.  On this weekend’s schedule:  re-reading Tuesday’s Teen Book Group Book, Mortal Engine by Philip Reeve, making a feltboard story for the “Playing” storytime, and enjoying the gorgeous weather that they say is coming for the weekend.  And maybe a blog entry or two, to get me back on schedule with my blogging…

Feltboard, Storytime

Dog’s Colorful Day by Emma Dodd

7 Comments

One more of my favorite feltboard creations – the pieces for Emma Dodd’s Dog’s Colorful Day.  It’s a great silly story about a white dog with one black spot on his ear who goes out for a walk in the park and gets all kinds of  spot stains on his coat, including blue paint, green grass, yellow pollen, brown chocolate, pink ice cream…you get the idea.  When I present this story to the toddler storytime, each time I add a new spot to Dog’s coat I ask the kids to help me count the total number of spots on that white dog out loud.  We also talk about the colors of each spot as it’s added to the board.  Pictured here are the spots, as well as the items that caused the spots.  Down towards the bottom of the picture are the yellow sponge that Dog’s owner uses to wash him, as well as Dog’s purple bed that he goes to sleep in after his long day.  Click on image to enlarge:

img_0632.JPG

Feltboard, Storytime

Monkey and Me by Emily Gravett

I love using this feltboard story, because I get the attendees to participate in the chant that repeats throughout the story:  “Monkey and me…monkey and me…”  As the group chants, they also pat their knees to the beat of the words.  Interactive fun!

Pictured here are the pieces I made for this feltboard version of Monkey and Me by Emily Gravett.  A little girl and her stuffed animal monkey have visited a zoo, and they list off each of the animals they saw there, including kangaroos, bats, penguins, elephants, and monkeys.  Click on image to enlarge:

img_0633.JPG

Feltboard, Storytime

Blue Sea by Robert Kalan

Another in my continuing series of photo documentation of my feltboard stories. Today we are featuring the pieces I made for Robert Kalan’s classic picturebook Blue Sea.  Once again, this feltboard story isn’t too elaborate, and doesn’t look too exciting in a mere photo: this feltboard story is all about the telling and the using of the pieces in a dramatic way.  “Look out, little fish!!” I’ll say with a scared overtone to my voice as I add the medium fish to the board…and the kids always gasp a teeny bit in fear for little fish’s life.  Just enough excitement for the under-four age group.  Click on photo to enlarge:

img_0631.JPG