Posts on storytime

Turkey on Thanksgiving Is So Last Year

Lisa — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:58:55 -0800

In storytime this morning, I asked the children what they were doing for Thanksgiving.

Me: There's a special holiday later this week. What is it?

Kids: Thanksgiving!

Me: Right! What are you going to do to celebrate Thanksgiving?

Kid 1: I'm going to be a skunk!

Kid 2: I'm going to be a fireman!

Kid 3: I'm going to be a fairy princess!

Me: OK, let me tell you what *I'm* going to do on Thanksgiving. My parents and some good friends are coming over, and we're going to eat a nice dinner together and celebrate the things that make us happy. What about you?

Kid 4: I'm going to be Bob the Builder!

Kid 5: I'm going to be a ladybug!

Kid 6: I'm going to be a skunk, too!

Clearly I've been going about this Thankgiving thing all wrong. I need a costume for Thursday, stat.

Magnetic Manipulatives for Storytime

Lisa — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:25:49 -0700

Abby (the) Librarian has a great post about how to make a flannel board story, from choosing the story to making the characters to tell it.

If you are a children's librarian or preschool teacher, there undoubtedly will come a time in your career when you are called upon to make a flannel board story—those storytelling kits with people and animals made of felt and told on a large, felt-covered board. Flannels bring stories off the page and invite improvisation and greater audience participation. Children can manipulate the figures to retell/invent stories themselves. Over all, they up the interactivity of a storytime.

Parents can use flannels with their own children at home, too, to promote early literacy. Storytelling in words and actions is a great pre-reading skill.

The best flannel board stories and rhymes, in my opinion, are those that...

are very concrete (can be represented with simple figures)
don't involve a lot of action (so once they're on the board you don't have to move them around a lot)
have a strong pattern or repetition (easier to tell without a script)
have opportunities for audience participation (identifying animals and colors, counting, etc.)

I confess that when I make a flannel board story, I favor laminated magnetic shapes over felt. (I'll talk about exceptions below). For me, it's easier to make the figures look the way I want without needing a zillion different colors of felt on hand or fussing with permanent markers. Also, you can use any magnetic surface to tell the story, including upright surfaces such as chalk boards, white boards, and refrigerators. (For felt shapes, you need a felt/flannel covered board tilted at a 10-ish degree angle. Not a tall order, but not as readily available to most people.)

How to make a magnet board story:

Choose your story and decide what essential characters and props you need. Don't get hung up on details, backgrounds, etc. Stay focused on the action of the story.
Draw, print out, photocopy, collage, and/or color the figures on plain paper. Cut them out. (You can also use die cut shapes. Or use pictures from a magazine. Etc.)
Use a laminating machine or contact paper to laminate your figures. Cut them out again, leaving a small border of laminate so the figures stay sealed and protected from wear and tear.
Apply 1/2 inch strips of magnetic tape to the backs of each figure, enough to keep it from sliding down the board.
As Abby advises, write that script!

However—those exceptions I mentioned—for some stories, felt is definitely the better material for the job. Any story that depends on concealment (e.g., "Inside the little red house, there was a little orange house...") is better done with felt, because felt's friction can keep multiple layers on the board at once. Another example is when you want to flip the shapes over to show their back side. For example, we have a wonderful flannel kit about six kittens tumbling into cans of paint. On one side, the kittens are all gray, but when you flip them over, they're each a different color the rainbow. Magnetic shapes are one-way only.

Here are some magnetic kits I've put together using various techniques.

For "The Hair-Raising Adventure of Sara Susan" (from Glad Rags: Stories and Activities Featuring Clothes for Children, by Irving & Currie), I used Microsoft clip-art for the figures. Sara Susan's messy hair piece has snarly yarn glued to it. I paperclip it over the top of her neat hair because, as I mentioned, magnets don't layer well.

I made up a "Five Little Garbage Trucks" rhyme and made these magnetic manipulatives to use with it. I traced the garbage truck from a picture I found online, photocopied it on green paper, and added colored shapes to distinguish the trucks.

I like to draw, so I got more ambitious with this adaptation of Robert Bright's My Red Umbrella. Still, it's nothing fancy: I drew all the characters and colored them with crayons. Voila!

Back to the Storytime Grind

Lisa — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:04:21 -0700

Today kicked off our fall storytime season at the library. (I do thrice-weekly storytimes for 2.5 to 3.5 year olds.) I was a little on edge leading up to it. For one thing, I did something like four storytimes over the course of the entire summer, so I was out of the swing of things. For another, a new season often means a new batch of kids and caregivers to "train." And for a third thing, I, um, hadn't totally figured out what the heck I was going to read until this morning.

But it worked out fine. Of course. Ninety-five percent of the time it does.

After weeks of parents and caregivers asking, "When's storytime going to start?!?!" I had a small group. My guess is their desperation was actually for school to start, and now that the kids are out of their hair more, storytime seems less urgent. Still, I know that I'll see this morning's group of seven double or triple in the weeks to come.

Even though it was cold and drizzly today, we did an aquatic theme: Beach Day, by Lakin; Tugga Tugga Tugboat, by Lewis; Captain Duck, by Alborough; and my "Five Green and Speckled Frogs" flannel. I also tried out Abby (the) Librarian's "If You're Wearing Red Today" song, which went over well. For our craft, we made sailboat pictures with paper triangles.

I don't do much in the way of letter awareness with my group—I tend to focus more on colors, counting, and shapes with my marginally verbal pipsqueaks—but I've been enjoying MotherReader's new ABC Storytime curriculum. She's got some great storybook and song suggestions for any occasion. Preschool teachers and librarians, check it out!

Storytime Favorites

Lisa — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:43:45 -0700

A few weeks ago, Abby the Librarian discussed some of her favorite storytime picture books and invited others to join in. I don’t do many storytimes during the summer, so at the time I drew a blank. Ditto for last week, when folks at my SCBWI network meeting were asking the same thing. Admittedly, it was eight o’clock, and my brain stops working at six.

Now that August is drawing to a close, it’s time I put the storytime hat back on and gave consideration to my fall curriculum. I do storytime three times a week, repeating the same program for 2 ½ to 3 ½ year olds the whole week. I always pick a theme, whether seasonal or simply fun. Storytime lasts half an hour, including a small craft (which I start five minutes from the end). We don’t require registration, but my groups average 15 to 25.

Because my audience is quite young and has the corresponding attention span, I pick books that are short: no more than two or three sentences per page. They should be concrete (think Piagetian stages of development). Concept books are good in moderation, but I also want books with plot. The pictures should be big and bright enough to see across the room. A great many books that work wonderfully for one-on-one sharing with a toddler don’t hold the attention of a group the same age.

I understand the love of Mo Willems’ Pigeon books and Zhaohua Ji’s No! That’s Wrong!, but experience has taught me to steer clear of them. Whether it’s my young, often not-very-verbal audience or my reserved personality (probably both), this particular style of interactive picture book usually falls flat for me.

Richard Egielski’s The Gingerbread Boy (Geringer, 1997) may top my list of favorite storytime books. It’s traditional. You can read it any time of year. It’s got great illustrations in a fun, New York setting. It’s the perfect length for three year olds but still works for older kids.

For concept books, some of my favorite authors are Monica Wellington (for careers) and Zoe Hall (for agriculture). Short, sweet, and appealing. Lois Ehlert and Anne Rockwell are up there, too, for various topics.

Some more of my favorite picture books, which are appropriate any time of year:

The Best Pet of All, by LaRochelle and Wakiyama (Dutton, 2004)
Big Smelly Bear, by Teckentrup (Boxer, 2007)
The Bus for Us, by Bloom (Boyds Mills, 2001)
Fluffy and Baron, by Rankin (Dial, 2006)
I’m Not Cute, by Allen (Hyperion, 2006)
Tiger Can’t Sleep, by Fore and Alley (Viking, 2006)
Whistle for Willie, by Keats (Viking, 1964)

I like to sing, and I love singing picture books like these:

If You’re Happy and You Know It (Jungle Edition), by Warhola (Orchard, 2007)
Punk Farm, by Krosoczka (Knopf, 2005)
The Seals on the Bus, by Hort and Karas (Holt, 2000)

Now that I’ve been doing storytime for almost three years, I’ve got a lot of programs together, many of which I’ve blogged about on Story Window, my library’s storytime blog. I make adjustments each time, working in new and new-to-me books, taking out books that fell flat. These are two of my best-received, most fun storytime programs:

Great Garbage!
Featuring Smash! Mash! Crash! There Goes the Trash (Odanaka/Hillenbrand), Trashy Town (Zimmerman/Clemesha), I Stink! (McMullan/McMullan), and some original action and counting rhymes.
Pat-a-Cake, Pat-a-Cake, Pizza Man
Featuring Pizza at Sally’s (Wellington), The Little Red Hen (Makes a Pizza) (Sturges), Hi, Pizza Man! (Walter/Goembel), and some fun songs and action rhymes.

If you do storytime for young children, please check out Story Window to get/share ideas! We’ll be posting more once our fall storytime season begins.