National Library Week 2014

I learned a BIG lesson with this one.  We do not have interesting books about libraries in our easy fiction collection.  I tried three different books in the two storytimes I had this week and they all kind of flopped.  Part of it might have been that the Wednesday group was a lot younger and they were super distracted by the baby who had just learned to walk and needed to stand all through storytime. So yeah, I would say that this storytime wasn’t a success, but I’m going to blog about it anyway.

BOOKS:

Mighty Mike Builds a Library by Kelly Lynch, The Library by Sarah Stewart, and I Don’t Like to Readby Nancy Carlson

I chose Mighty Mike because, duh, heavy equipment.  But nothing really exciting happens in the story.  Mike decides to build a library and he does it.  There needs to be some kind of twist where it doesn’t look like the library is actually going to happen.  I picked up I Don’t Like to Read because I love Nancy Carlson and it looked shorter for the toddler audience.  But toddlers can’t read and they don’t get why it’s a thing and the baby was walking around and around and around so this one didn’t catch that much attention.  I really like The Library.  The pictures are beautiful, and the story is near and dear to my heart.  I think I probably would buy books until I couldn’t move around any more if left to my own devices.  Kids don’t care.  They want their action and adventure and this just doesn’t have it.  *SIGH* I’m going to root around and find some books that will work.  I’m not ready to give up on good books about libraries yet.

SONG:

I was super excited about this one.  We sang “These Are My Glasses” by Laurie Berkner.  We did the practice actions at the beginning of the song like she does on the CD and then sang the song all the way through twice.  It was good.   I do think that we could’ve done something with even bigger actions and that would’ve helped them get some of their wiggles out.

CRAFT:

We made…….bookmarks! Of course!  I set out markers and foam stickers and the bookmarks and the kids went to town.  They used more stickers than markers, but that’s okay.  My Wednesday group was still so crazy that half of them didn’t even make bookmarks because they were distracted and wanted to build blocks or walk around or something.

My big takeaway from this week was just let it go.  If they don’t want to make bookmarks, just let them play.  No big deal.  Also I need to get braver and just interrupt a story and start a song.  It goes against my VERY NATURE to do this, but I have to.  It’ll be better for everyone in storytime.  NEXT WEEK is bears so it should be a better time had by all.