We had another great Step Into Storytime session this morning! Although I don’t run my storytimes that differently from when I started (all-ages storytimes in summer ’18, 2- and 3-year-olds in fall ’18), I’ve made some tweaks and the last few in particular have been smooth and successful. The grown-ups who come to storytime set a great example for their kiddos by being alert and engaged – they sing with me, do hand motions or help the kiddos do them, and react to the stories.

• Welcome, announcements (library is closed next Monday for MLK Jr. Day)
• “Hello Friends” song with ASL (Jbrary)
• “The More We Get Together” with ASL
• Jump! by Tatsuhide Matsuoka: I almost never do board books during storytime, because they’re smaller and therefore harder to see from the back of the room, but this one is perfect. It has a simple pattern (animal, jump, animal, jump), a funny surprise (guess what snails don’t do so well?), and ends by including the reader (“And I jump, too”). Of course we read this one standing up so we could JUMP!
• The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld: This is a longer, quieter book, but an important one, and the kids paid attention. It’s a good reminder for everyone about how to handle disappointment: when something you made collapses and you’re disappointed, what you might want isn’t a solution – it’s for someone to listen.
• After all that listening, we stood up again and I explained about the body’s midline, then we did some crossing the midline stretches (inspired by the December SLJ article “Storytime’s Brain-Building Power“) to help develop bilateral coordination.
• “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes”
• Song cube: “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” three times: regular, fast, slow
• Red Light, Green Lion by Candace Ryan: I skipped most of the text in black, focusing on the text in red and green. “Red light, green liiiiiiiii-“
• Mouse house game with felt board: Three rounds of finding the mouse, trying to make sure each kid who wanted a turn to pick a color got one. “Little mouse, little mouse, are you in the [color] house?” Everyone looked invested in the mouse hunt, even those who didn’t want to guess a color.
• Little Penguins by Cynthia Rylant and Christian Robinson: I whipped up five felt mittens. We identified the colors before the book, then I handed the mittens out to five kids. Unlike with the fruit in The Very Hungry Caterpillar last week, there weren’t enough mittens for everyone who wanted one, so I might not do that again unless I can figure out a way to give everyone a turn. Good book for today, though, since we had snow flurries this morning.
• “Shake Your Sillies Out” with egg shakers: This was my first time attempting freeze dance in storytime. Some of the older kids were familiar with the game (we had a couple 4-year-olds today), but the music wasn’t quite loud enough. It was fine, though! They love dancing with shaker eggs.
• I decided to skip my last book (Make A Wish, Bear) because it had already been half an hour, and go straight to “Goodbye Friends”
• Clean up mats
• Color giant mittens (I drew two huge mittens in black marker on a piece of butcher paper that I taped to the floor; kids used crayons to color in and around them). Also pulled out our giant blocks to tie in with The Rabbit Listened.