A Red Storytime!

This was my first week of planning my own storytime at the new job! I have been doing storytime for the last few weeks, but they were pre-planned from before I got here. I think we all know there is a huge difference between doing a storytime you planned yourself versus doing a storytime someone else planned. As I am sure you can imagine, I was super excited to share storytime this week since it was my own creation!
I took a page out of Storytime Katie’s book and decided to do some color themes. We are starting out with RED!

The books we read this week were:

The Little Red Hen (Makes a Pizza) by Philemon Sturges, illustrated by Amy Wood.

I really love this book. Even though it’s a bit on the longish side, it’s so hilarious and silly it keeps the kids’ attention all the way through. I love reading it aloud and doing different voices for each animal.

 

The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry and the Big Hungry Bear by Don and Audrey Wood.

This is a personal storytime classic from my days as a storytime intern. I like this book a lot because it sets the children up to be scared of the BIG HUNGRY BEAR but it ends up being a sweet nice story. Be prepared for lots of “The bear never came!” Even though no one seems to really mind that.

 

Fire Truck by Peter Sis.

This is a very simple book about a boy who loves fire trucks so much he turns into one! It short and sweet and just the right amount of fun.

 

Ten Red Apples by Pat Hutchins

This is a new book to me, I discovered it when scanning the shelves before storytime. It’s great! I really think it begs to be made into a flannel board so you may be seeing that pop up on the blog soon.

The Extras:

 I will be doing a longer post about songs/fingerplays/flannel boards etc. soon. So look out for that. I am trying to teach my group a lot of songs so we have a lot of repetition going on that doesn’t really have anything to do with the theme. I am totally OK with that.

How it Went:

Overall, this was a success. The groups will need a bit of work in transitioning from the pervious style to my style. I see very larger groups (over 4o kids!!) so a lot of storytime is crowd control. There are lots of movements and songs. As far as the books go, they really enjoyed them. Little Red Hen (Makes a Pizza) was very popular and they asked me to read it again and again and again. I held up the books and asked them to guess what the theme was this week. After a few random guesses, one of them got it! I think I will continue to do this each week just to see if they can tell.

Craft

For the time being, I am not doing crafts. I really hope to change this soon but if you want an idea for a craft (it can really be anything red for this one) you can take a look at Storytime Katie’s Red Storytime.

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Look who’s back…

Helloooo! Is there anybody out there? I am back from a long hiatus! I moved jobs and it has taken a bit for the dust to settle. I apologize for my super long absence from blogging. I will try to not let it happen again. I changed jobs in the absolute middle of Summer Reading so things were a bit crazy. I am not sure I would ever recommend doing this… I guess there’s no harm in jumping in head first, eh? It’s all over now so I’ve been able to get my head on straight and have finally been able to sit down after a few weeks of running around totally crazy.

So, things have changed for me storytime-wise. I am now doing four storytimes a week, three of them are local preschools/daycares that come to the library and the other is an evening storytime for folks in the neighborhood. I am still going to plan one storytime per week and just run it three four separate times. So, when I discuss it in the blog, I will tell you about the books and any extras that are necessary to discuss then I will tell you what the kids thought.

The other HUGE difference is the preschools and daycares come for an HOUR so my storytimes are much, much longer. These groups are walking dozens of small children long distances so we are making it worth their while and having a long program for them. I know everyone has an opinion about appropriate length for storytime. I, myself think about 25-30 minutes is the sweet spot, but this is something out of my control. As a result these programs are very fingerplay, flannel board and movement heavy. I still read 3-4 books but that happens towards the beginning since the groups are generally less antsy at the beginning and can sit still then. After that we are getting up and moving a lot more.

Working at a new library always brings new colleagues to learn from and this place is no exception. The person I work with most closely is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to fingerplays, so that’s been a huge help.

Finally, the last thing that has changed is I am not doing any crafts – for the time being. My preschool/daycare groups are all much too large and we don’t really have the space supplies. There also aren’t quite enough adults around to help. Each group has at least 45 children so it’s a little intimidating. I do want to get a craft started with my nighttime group, because that is generally much smaller. Eventually, I do want to start doing some crafts with the larger groups because frankly speaking I think it would be helpful for them and also a great use of that hour. Hopefully I can get this started soon!

It’s all a work in progress. Does anyone have any advice? I have been re-reading Storytime Katie’s blog entries because I know she is doing similar things. You will even notice she has inspired my first few weeks of planning on my own at this job.