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Now that you have a vetted best of the best storytime activity list, let’s do some storytime planning with it.

You may already be a proponent of no-theme storytimes or flow storytimes, but if not, today’s exercise is to give this strategy a try.

Why?

Because it’s a way of prioritizing our best content, the activities and components that are most strongly aligned with our goals, over the books and activities that we reach for because they match our theme. I’m personally agnostic on theme or non-themed storytimes, but it should be clear by now I am 100% a proponent of choosing materials for the right reasons. Testing out a non-themed or flow storytime is one way we can work on putting our priorities into practice.

First, read this post from the amazing Jbrary: Storytime Themes vs. Storytime Flow to give yourself an idea of what a storytime might look like when it’s not centered around a theme.

Then, pick a place to start–it could be one of your activities from your Top 40 List, or it could be a favorite book. (I’ve found that flow storytimes are a great way to make sure I have an inclusive book in my storytimes: instead of starting with a theme and looking for an inclusive title that “fits,” I start with an amazing book and go from there.)

Work forwards and backwards linking activities and books to your storytime flow until you have a plan. Refer to your Top 40 List often! Some connections will leap out at you, but don’t stop there. What are ways you can adapt items from your list to fit your flow? (As I mentioned last time, I really like to use Green Grass Grew All Around–and I’ll just change up what’s in the tree depending on the connection I’m trying to make. Maybe there will be an apple on the branch, or maybe an owl, or a swing.)

Don’t forget to think about your transition statements and interstitial messaging!

That’s it, that’s the exercise! How does it feel to let go of that theme as an organizing principle? I love knowing that I’m choosing activities and books that really speak to my storytime goals. I still routinely use themes as a filter, but I feel like I’m sharing a lot less “filler” material when I think about flow and start with my Top 40 list instead of a google search for theme related ideas.

Bonus: Share your plan with someone!

Keep going: Do another storytime flow plan! Try a partial flow, or plan a themed storytime but expand your keywords as you choose materials (eg, not just bears, but–honey, berries, hibernating, porridge, trees, fish…)

Apply your learning: write out your plan and add a phrase or a sentence reminding yourself how each storytime element or component or activity helps you meet your storytime goals. Which goals are the easiest to support? Which are harder? What can you change to more fully support all of your goals?

Shout out: To Jbrary for the link! <3 Who else has a storytime flow blog post to tell us about?

Thanks for waiting for me to get back to these posts! (Imagine, things being unpredictable right now, smh)

By now you’ve put together a Top 40 List and looked closely at what was on it and now I’m going to give you a task that will take awhile, if you let it, because now it’s time to look at everything on your list one by one, and think about each thing in terms of your overall goals for storytime.

My own hope is that as we look at our storytime practice carefully & thoughtfully, that we slowly add to our repertoire more and more of those activities that fit both categories: things we LOVE to do, and things that really deeply help us meet as many of our storytime goals as possible.

Why?

Doing things we love to do helps us lead storytimes that feel warm and genuine and enjoyable. (I don’t know most of the musical guests on the Tonight Show, but I can’t help but smile at Jimmy Fallon’s utter glee when he does those clips where he gets to play kids’ instruments alongside them.)

Sharing mostly those activities that closely align with our goals allows us to make the most of the limited minutes of storytime we have each week with our families.

And having a long list of quality, sure-fire activity choices helps us to be as efficient as possible with our planning. I love browsing storytime plans, cute song ideas, and flannelboards online, but it’s SO EASY to go down the rabbit hole and let time get away from me!

What do you do from here?

Take one thing on your list, and think about your storytime mission statement. Jot down a little list of how that activity helps you meet some or all of those goals. Are there ways you can tweak that activity to better align with your goals?

That’s it! Do that for all 40 things on your list.

This isn’t a fancy exercise, but it’s good practice in looking closely at individual parts of your storytime to see how they contribute to your goals overall. (Just like we did with looking closely at your messaging during storytime.)

You may find that some of the activities on your list are even more powerful than you thought! The very first thing I put on my own Top 40 List is “When They Woke Up” or “Sleeping Sleeping.” Kids LOVE to play pretend so this is always a big hit. But when I thought about in terms of our goals (welcoming, engaging, literacy-based) I realized how much it fits all of them. It can be adjusted for all ages and different abilities. It fosters participation from the big kids and the babies love to watch everyone “sleep” and “wake up.” It supports vocabulary, dialog, phonological awareness. It builds executive function skills.

Now that I’ve realized how well it fits for our storytimes, I repeat it more regularly. I also look for ways I can incorporate some of its features (asking questions, imaginative play, practicing waiting, chanting) into other activities.

Or you may find that some of the activities you most love maybe aren’t as aligned with your goals as you thought. This doesn’t mean that you never get to do them anymore! But it does give you a chance to think about what DOES align with your goals.

For instance, the folk song Rattlin’ Bog is on my Top 40 list. I *love* this song. I love the tune, I love putting up piece after piece on the flannelboard as I sing, it makes me super happy. BUT “engagement” is one of our goals for storytime, and this…doesn’t score as high on that factor as it could. Kids sit and listen and watch me do the flannel pieces, but the way I typically shared this didn’t leave extra room for more participation than that.

So I still do it every once in awhile, but more often now I’ve shifted to doing Green Grass Grew All Around. It’s a similar cumulative song, and the “green grass grew all around” phrase is extremely fun for me to sing up and down the scale, but instead of a flannelboard, I’ve worked out full body motions (that even cross the midline!). Now kids who don’t want to or can’t sing along with me can be following along with their bodies instead of just sitting and watching.

Work through your list and think about each of your activities and build a power list of the best of the best. Again, not so you stop doing the other things, but so you have a mental template of what your top storytime material looks like. You’ll feel more confident in repeating these activities more often, and when you DO go down that storytime planning rabbit hole, you’ll have a clear idea of the types of material that will work best for YOUR storytimes.

Bonus: as always, I’d love to hear what you discover through this exercise! Any surprises?

Keep Going: Choose an activity that did NOT make it on to your Top 40 List and see if it meets your goals. Is there a similar activity that you like better that you can add to your repertoire?

Apply your learning: Make a storytime plan using only items from your Top 40 List that also closely align with your storytime goals. How many different storytimes plans can you make using this top tier list of material?

Shout out: to everyone who has read through all of these posts and is still coming back to see what I have to say <3 Thanks for taking storytime so seriously and being willing to explore what you do and why you do it so your families can benefit even more from your expertise and compassion.

First exercise! (See this post for more info)

Write a mission statement for storytimes at your library.

Why?

Because we can’t make effective changes to improve our programs and services unless we know where we’re trying to go and what we want to achieve. Also because wow I bet in the coming year we are all going to have to make even more difficult choices than we’re used to about resources, time, and staff, and we’ll be better prepared to make better decisions with a clear road map.

I know you may not be the supervisor, director, or decision-maker about storytimes at your library. You may not be in a place to write a mission statement “for real.” That’s OK. If your bosses are supportive, share your work with them. If they are not, you can still use this exercise to clarify your thinking and to focus your own storytime planning and delivery efforts.

I’ll share some questions and ideas to get you started, then at the end I’ll share the goals statement that we developed at my library.

Choose one or more of the following prompts and just write things down, don’t overthink this part or try to craft your language yet:

A. What is the mission statement for your library as a whole? Find it and write it down.

(If your library doesn’t have a formal mission statement, what can you infer about your director’s values and priorities from your existing programs, collections, services, and facilities? Or look up some other library’s mission statements. What words and concepts do you feel match your library’s approach?)

What do the phrases and ideas in this mission statement (or values/concepts) look like in storytime? eg: lifelong learning is a common phrase in library mission statements. What does learning look like in storytime, or what would you WANT it to look like? Does it have to do with building a knowledge of excellent children’s books and stories? Does it have to do with early literacy concepts and skills?

Another way to think about this is: How does storytime help move the needle on those big ideas in the overall mission statement for my community? eg: if we really mean lifelong, we don’t just mean adult education after school & college, we mean from the very beginning of life, by offering babies a warm supportive environment and lots of oral language exposure.

B. Think about your community:

What are some pressing needs for local families? How do these needs intersect with the role of the library?
What are other community organizations offering to young families? What is the library duplicating or not duplicating?
What questions do I get asked over and over by parents and by educators? How can storytime help them answer these questions?

C. Ask yourself some questions:

What do I wish parents and caregivers knew about storytime?
If kids could graduate from my storytimes with 3 skills/accomplishments/experiences/memories what would they be?
What is it about storytime that gives me energy to squeeze it in to all the other things I have to do?
What else do I wish I could do with my storytime program and why?
What can libraries do with storytimes that other agencies/organizations/businesses can’t do with theirs?
If I never could do storytime again, what would I miss the most?
If I never could do storytime again, what would our families miss the most?

Next:

Once you do some noodling around, look at what you’ve written. What themes and ideas rise to the top? These are the components that you can play with in crafting a mission statement for your storytimes. We all want storytime to do and be everything for everybody, but we have to prioritize and focus our efforts. A mission statement can help you articulate what needs are most important to you and your community, and then give you something to refer to in the future that will help you decide if you’re meeting those needs, or if there are ways you can tweak what you’re doing to be more effective.

Remember, just like there’s a thousand library mission statements, there is no single “right” mission statement for all storytimes. Your mission statement should serve your library.

Now that you’ve done some thinking and writing, here’s our storytime goals statement.

“In order to help families build early literacy skills, storytimes provide a welcoming, engaging and age-appropriate learning experience that encourages positive interactions between children and caregivers.”

Bonus: Did you get one drafted? Share it with us!

Keep going: Write a mission or goals statement for your other programs for other age groups. Write an overall mission or goals statement for your department.

Apply your learning: Keep your mission statement in front of you the next time you plan a storytime. How is each part of your storytime helping you with these goals? What are you doing in your storytime practice that you can let go of? What could you add to better address your mission?

Shout out: To my boss Lori Romero and my colleague Jessica Fredrickson, whose expertise and wisdom are very much a part of my thinking on the importance of storytime mission statements! We took part of this work to Power Up last year!

Recently the amazing Amy at Catch the Possibilities posted a pic of her Valentine Tree (you can see versions on the Flannel Friday Pinterest here and here) and I just fell in love with the shape of her tree and branches, and immediately started thinking (during a two-hour meeting, natch) of different versions that would be fun to make.

Amy kindly sent a photo of her tree and I made a pattern copying hers as closely as possible. I had found packages of 1-yard lengths of felt at Michael’s and bought them for another project, but I cut off an 18″ x 18″ section of the brown felt and made my tree from that.

Then for my first round I just made simple leaf shapes in the different colors of green I had on hand. Our largest storytime is capped at 25 kids, and sometimes big siblings are along for the ride, so I made 8 of each color (except that second-lightest green, I only had one scrap of that! I’ll go buy another sheet and add more) so I would have 32 leaves in all, plenty for everyone to have one plus a few special guests to have one, too.

I won’t necessarily use this with a rhyme, but will probably put up the tree shape, talk about some vocabulary (trunk, branch, limb, twig, roots), and hand out a leaf to each child. Sometimes when I do things like this I call the kids to the board in groups (all the red pieces, or all the stars) but I think for a lot of kids it would be tricky to ask them to distinguish between these shades of green in the same shape, so instead I will probably just have them bring them to the board as I hand them out. (“Here’s your leaf, go put it on the tree!”)

BUT this is just a starter pack! Obviously I need to do hearts for a Valentine Tree, and Amy suggested a Jellybean Tree would be a fabulous way to use up our felt scrap piles! I also want to make a set of leaves for fall: more yellows, some tans, browns, and reds. We’ll see what else I decide to add!

Here’s a sneak peak for springtime:

Don’t forget you can add your Flannel Friday post to the new Tumblr submissions page, and you can see all the most current posts on the This Week in Flannel Friday Pinterest board

Hi all!

Here is a super long repost of the announcement I placed on Facebook at the beginning of the month!

tl;dr: Flannel Friday is transitioning to a new method for collecting and sharing ideas!

Believe it or not, Flannel Friday is turning seven years old this year! That’s about five more years of storytime ideas than I ever expected us to gather and I’m incredibly grateful to each and every member of this community who has helped keep us together for so long.

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted a Round Up schedule for January or February. That’s been deliberate on my part while I have been consulting with our Flannel Friday Fairy Godmothers–our moderators, schedulers, and question-answerers. Our anniversary seemed like a good time to take a look at where we are and to think about what’s next.

Don’t worry, Flannel Friday isn’t going anywhere! But changing patterns of engagement both within FF and in the larger social media world have meant that it is a good time to adapt our process a bit. We still have a group of regular volunteers to host Round Ups, but fewer folks are able to serve as Fairy Godmother. We still have entries (almost) every week for the Round Ups, but smaller Round Ups every week than in the past. In the big picture, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Facebook remain very active platforms, while blogs in general have become a little less central to the social media universe.

We very much want to keep this amazing community going! We want to keep supporting our Flannel Friday bloggers, and we want to make it easier for those of you who don’t have blogs to share your ideas, and also make it a little easier on our Fairy Godmothers to stay on top of things week to week.

So I’ve decided to run with an idea of Anne’s, and replace the weekly blog-based Round Ups with a rolling submissions form on Tumblr. You don’t have to have a Tumblr to participate! You don’t even have to have a blog to participate!

Instead, we will pin a link to a Tumblr submissions form to our Facebook page and the Flannel Friday website. When you have an idea to share with Flannel Friday–at any time, not just on Friday–all you have to do is click on the link and fill out the form. You’ll be able to choose to share a link to a Flannel Friday post on your blog, as we do now, OR you’ll be able to choose to just upload a photo of your flannelboard, and add a caption with any info you’d like to share.

The Fairy Godmothers will take turns keeping an eye on the Flannel Friday Tumblr, approving the posts, and sending them to Pinterest (which just takes a couple clicks right from Tumblr). You’ll be able to scroll through the Tumblr to look at ideas, or browse Pinterest as usual. Instead of a “This Week” board, we’ll have a “This Month” board, so you can check all the newest pins as they come in. And of course, we’ll pin to the theme boards as well.

Again, you won’t need a blog OR a Tumblr account to do this. You won’t need to wait for the Placeholder post to go live, and the Fairy Godmothers won’t have to organize hosts and pinners. My plan is to continue the Round Ups as usual for another month or so, to give everyone a chance to find this message and get ready for the transition. We’ll have plenty of time to try the new form and ask questions before we bring an end to the weekly Round Ups.

I think this will be a great way to include even more Flannel Friday-ers, while still supporting our regular bloggers.

Let me know what your thoughts and questions are! Just comment or ask questions here on this post, or on this announcement on our Facebook page, or send a message to flannelboardfriday @ gmail.com. If you want to jump right in and test out the new system, here’s the link to our Tumblr and here’s the link to our new submissions form.

I’m posting a Round Up Placeholder for this week here.