After missing the last two Mondays (for Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the NELA conference), it was so nice to be back at storytime! And I was able to bring two new elements to storytime today, another song with ASL from NELA and a mouse house felt board game from the Belmont Public Library storytime earlier this month.

• Welcome and announcements
• “Hello Friends” song with ASL (Jbrary)
• “The More We Get Together” song with signs for “more,” “together,” “happy,” “be,” and “friends” (hat tip to the Chelmsford children’s librarians at NELA!)
• The Giant Jumperee by Julia Donaldson and Helen Oxenbury
• My Name Is Elizabeth by Annika Dunklee and Matthew Forsythe
• “Shake Your Sillies Out” with shaker eggs
• Shh! We Have A Plan by Chris Haughton
• “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”
• The mouse house game: “Little mouse, little mouse, are you in the [color] house?” We played it three times, with me switching the houses and mouse location each time (I made six houses, but only four fit on the felt board at one time).
• Not A Stick by Antoinette Portis
• “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” standing in star position and rocking side to side
• Spots in a Box by Helen Ward
• “Goodbye Friends” song with ASL (Jbrary)
• Clean up mats, put down paper for spots craft (using glue sticks to stick colored spots to the butcher paper)

The new song and game went well. Lately I’ve been feeling like six books is too many – most other storytimes I’ve been to for this age group usually do only three or so – and five is still plenty.

I always sketch an outline of my plan for storytime, and it always changes a little bit. This time I switched the order of two books (Not A Stick and Shh! We Have A Plan), switched the order of two movement songs (“Shake Your Sillies Out” and “Twinkle,” because one kid saw the shaker eggs and got very excited), and added a song (“Row Row Row,” because there is paddling in Shh! We Have A Plan). The baby sign language cards pictured above I ended up taking down before storytime started (they’re great up close, but hard to see from farther away). I also had A Parade of Elephants and several other books available as options, but did stick with my original lineup. Next week, elephants! (And dinosaurs.)

Left: stack of storytime books. Right: the final lineup of five books on the storytime chair.