Bubbles and Ducks Storytime

Today is Friday which means the end of the working week for most but for us here in our library it means Storytime!

We hold storytime at 12pm every Friday and it is my job to read the stories. This is a new role assigned to me at the start of the year while the librarian who usually does it is on maternity leave.

I have to admit I didn't relish the thought of taking on the job when I was asked. But it is an essential part of public library work and after eight years working in libraries I knew it would catch up with me eventually. Don't get me wrong -I have plenty of experience with reading to my neices nephews over the years and I've read to my own little boy since he was 3 months old.

I can fully appreciate the benefits of reading aloud to children and I think storytime is great for building childrens' social skills and confidence levels as well as developing a love of reading.. I just wasn't keen on doing it myself.

Toddler's are a tough audience! They don't hold back in telling you if they think a story is too long or they dont like the song. (both complaints I had this morning).  A friend once told me - dealing with a challenge is like when you're in a canoe and the water gets choppy, the best way not to tip over is to face the waves head-on. So I decided take it on and do the best I could and at least if I turned out to be disastrous then it was only temporary so no harm done. Well, hopefuly, no harm done, no children traumitised from the crazy librarian who couldn't sing.

So I started last Januray with a straighforward formula of sitting on a chair and reading stories to whoever would listen and worked my way from there. A few weeks later I decided to try out sitting on a story rug, that went down very well. Then a few weeks later I plucked up the courage to sing a few songs - nobody ran away holding their ears. And after trawling the internet for ideas and inspiration, today's storytime was the first one that had a bit of structure, purpose and even a theme!

Today's theme was Bubbles/water/ducks. A bit of a mish-mash but sort of connected. I have a memory like a seive. If you tell me your name, I'll repeat it like the book says and still instantly forget it. I have, have, have to write things down. So I actually wrote out a plan today, of what stories I was going to read, what songs I was going to sing and in what order. It went a little like this.

• Give every child a sticker with their name on it. 
• Invite them to come sit on the rug.
• Sing a hello song incorporating each child's name
• Chat for a few minutes with the kids about weather etc
• Read Here Comes the Rain by Mary Murphy
• Sing wheels on the bus
• Read Come On Daisy by Jane Simmons
• Sing row row your boat
• Final story Big Red Bath by Julia Jarman
• Grand Finale - blow bubbles for the kids to catch.

Needless to say, it didn't quite go to that plan.  We have a mixture of ages at our storytime and it changes from week to week. So I had to 'read my audience' so to speak. This week the children were a little older and not much into singing so I had an emergency book - The No No Bird by Andrew Fusek Peters which I read and scrapped Row Row Your Boat. I had my verses for the Wheels on the Bus in a different order than what one little boy was used to and he wasn't impressed. In the end they all left before I got to blow any bubbles. I kept it a secret planning on surprising them but I guess I should have at least told them there was a surprise on the way. Tough crowd indeed! But good fun. I blew the bubbles anyway.

All the ideas and inspriation for my storytime came from other librarians who generously put videos, song lyrics and ideas up on youtube and various blogs. One great blog I discovered during the week is www.librarystorytime.wordpress.com There hasn't been any new posts since 2010 but it still have lots of ideas on it which I'll be dipping into in the future.