Mel's Desk

When I go to visit our branches, I like to tweet out pictures of the great displays I see, and so awhile ago I posted some pictures from a fun children’s Poetry Month display. Marge asked if I were going to write a post about it and I said, “I could!”

This display and passive programming idea is actually the brainchild of Julie, who wanted a way to shine a light on all those beautiful poetry books in 800s that never seem to circ as much as we want them to. She took the magnetic poetry concept and turned it into something fun for the kids to do while they were in the library.

On a big set of display shelves, she created a poetry book display:

And on a table nearby she had paper, crayons, scissors, glue, instructions, and two baskets of words!

The words Julie found by going to sites that list the most common words in the language–she didn’t say which ones, but you could look here, or use the Dolch sight word list, too. Julie also added in some library-related words to the mix!

All the words were printed, cut apart, and put in the big baskets. A couple of signs explained what to do. Julie said the table was in frequent use and the poetry books flew off the shelves. She saved a few of the poems they found on the table at the end of the day–you can see that the big kids did this too!

This display and activity has been up all month–what a simple but powerful passive program! Poetry Month is a natural fit for this, obviously, but this is something you could put out at different times of year when you need something to do. Just add in extra words to fit your time of year (fireworks, ice cream; acorns, squirrels) and/or use colors to match (red and pink at Valentines, white text on black background for Halloween). Have fun!

If you are here from Thrive Thursday, welcome! I actually don’t write much about school-age programming, but I do have a few after-school programs written up from a long time ago if you’d like a look: Kaleidoscope & Mirror Crafts and a Mo Willems Party.

So yesterday I shared the responses to the first thought experiment: how many storytimes could you do, energy-wise, given unlimited resources to do them? And the answer was 3-6 storytimes per week for most of us.

Now, the second half of that question was this:

Another Thought Experiment: Say you had as many staff as you wanted to present all the storytimes at your location. How many storytimes would you assign to each person?

Guess what? The highest responses put storytimes at 2 per week per staff person, even though most of us in ideal circumstances might have the energy to do more.

How many storytimes per week would you assign to one person?

This isn’t really a surprise–we’re talking about the real world, after all, where storytime is balanced against lots of other parts of the job. And it makes sense, with such a vital, core service, to be as conservative as possible and make sure staff have the resources and stamina to do the best job they can, week after week, without getting burned out. But given that, there’s also a time efficiency to consider–and having every staff person do ONE storytime would possibly mean a duplication of effort (that multiple-prep issue) that doubling up at least a little bit balances out.

So there’s the last of the survey posts! Thanks for taking the survey, and thanks for reading and commenting. I’ve found this quick sketch of the numbers super interesting and actually helpful–hope you did too!

I am looping back around one more time to the Storytime Workload Survey, even though time and tides and you guys have marched on long since. We are knee-deep in a major staffing reorganization at my library and my time management this month has been dicey, but there’s one more set of questions I wanted to talk about, so here you go and apologies for the delay!

As a quick recap, Lisa and I threw together the quickest survey ever on storytime workloads, and between the two of us we’ve responded to the questions about breaks, numbers of storytimes per week, prep time, the impact of single v. multiple preps per program, and amount of other programming, here and at Libraryland.

The last two questions in the survey were thought experiments. With our upcoming staff reorganization on my mind, I was wondering if there were any way to gauge how many storytimes is too many to assign to one person. This really is an impossible question, I know, because the energy required to present storytime lands on different people in different ways, and we will never be free of other responsibilities that crowd our minds and demand our time and attention. However, at my library we are now in a position to streamline our storytime providers’ responsibilities SOMEWHAT, and given that change, naturally I wondered if that would make a difference in how many storytimes per week would now feel comfortable and do-able to the staff.

We asked this:

Einstein-esque Thought Experiment: Say you worked in a community that could support an infinite number of storytimes per week, and that you were on the team that provided them all, and were provided with the time & resources you needed for planning and prep, and you had no other responsibilities to worry about until storytimes were covered. How many storytimes could you personally present each week without running out of steam?

The intent was to TRY to assess a raw energy level, a humane set of expectations around this complex library service…I did not want to take my own personal experience as the baseline.

So, what were the responses?

The pie chart we got from Google forms is pretty useless, so here is the raw data. This week we are at 143 responses (up from 130 at the end of March). My caption should read “storytimes each week.”

How many storytimes would you have energy for given no other responsibilities?

The highest watermark here is pretty evenly at 3-6 storytimes per week, with the lower peaks at 2, 7, 8, and 10 storytimes per week. Also, if you are one of the 3 people who marked down “more than 15” I would like to shake your hand.

How do these numbers feel to you? I think it’s interesting to compare these results to the actual number of storytimes most of the survey responders do per week, since it indicates that on the whole (overall! broadly speaking!) in ideal situations we could probably sustain more storytimes than we currently do.

Now, stay tuned for tomorrow, when I post the second half of the Thought Experiments, and you can see how different the second question turned out from the first!

Another question we did not ask on the Storytime Workload Survey is how much time it takes to prepare a storytime. We did look a little bit at how many other programs besides storytime you’re responsible for, but that’s a different angle.

Here are some of the comments you made about prep time:

I would easily present more storytimes more often throughout the year if I didn’t have other obligations, such as Lego Club or seasonal programs for older kids.

I am a one-man show at my library, and my branch can really support the number of programs that I have, but I do feel like I do too many programs with all the planning each program requires for just one person.

This is a small stand-alone library, so I am the only person doing children’s programming. Wish I had someone to partner with—not because of the workload, but for another brain to toss ideas around with.

I have scaled back my storytime offerings due to The Great Burnout of Summer 2013. 🙂 My work desk is also the public desk in the children’s room. When I’m not presenting programs or at lunch, I’m at the desk.

I thought that my answers to the last two questions would be different. I personally thought that I could do more, but when I thought about how much energy I put into a storytime and the preparation I think that three is a good number (maybe stretching to 4). For the last question I also thought that I would want people to do more storytimes per week, however my staff not only does storytime, but on desk duties, material ordering, collections weeding, and sometimes other programming.

I do two toddler and two baby programs each week, usually keeping things the same, which cuts down on prep time.

These are really hard to think about when not every week looks the same, and I am a one-person department with no scheduled off-desk time. EVER. My work space is the middle of the children’s department, and I am “Youth Services” so I do everything from birth to teens and all SRP planning singlehandedly. Not to mention thinking about outreach and community connections [….] thinking about just storytimes seems almost a luxury.

Our system just started a big push for Early Literacy programs and quadrupled the number of programs for 0-5 year olds each branch is expected to do. We’re still figuring out how to make it all work without increased staff or budgets.

At my first children’s services position I was the only staff member at a branch with much lower attendance & fewer programs than my current branch, but I was much more stressed out. I was less prepared b/c I had no mentor and no planning time. Time off the desk is essential, as well as adequate training.

In many cases (such as mine), story times are maybe 1/3 to 1/4 of our responsibilities, yet require the majority of our energy and time. I love story times, but I also love other aspects of being a librarian and unfortunately I’m not able to commit as much time/energy to those aspects because of the several storytimes per week I do.

The biggest issue I have is story time prep. I often have so much on my plate between desk time, volunteer training, processing etc. that I don’t have the time I need to prep for my story time programs. It takes time to create flannel boards or learn new songs and fingerplays. As the only Youth Service person at my library I sometimes think the other staff are not aware how much time it takes. Or that me cutting out felt boards is actual work.

Any assessment of staff time per storytime must account for prep time. The amount of prep is, like all our other numbers, going to vary wildly, depending on how experienced your staff is, what constitutes “storytime” at your library (books? books and puppet show? books and puppet show AND CRAFT???), the number of prepared/dedicated resources at your location, and in many cases, the amount of caffeine readily available. 🙂 Set-up and take-down time must be counted as well, all of which must be balanced against prep needed for other programs and time spent on the desk.

A related issue is how to advocate for more prep time if you need it, which really deserves its own post–or ten–but a very first step to making better decisions and being a good advocate for yourself is to be realistic about how much time you are spending on each storytime (cutting felt in front of the TV at home? learning songs in the car?), and/or looking carefully at what you wish you could include in your storytimes if you weren’t too short on prep time (new songs? take-home pages? literacy messages?).

What do you think? What are your issues around prep time? Have you successfully streamlined your prep, or negotiated more time for storytime? How much time do you spend on storytime each week? What are factors that affect the time you spend (professional collections of picture books that are always there? 10 years of storytime plans in your harddrive? A need to present a craft each week?)

Now the Storytime Workload Survey was put together quickly, which you can tell because we totally forgot to account for the multiple-prep issue when asking, “How many storytimes could you do a week?” Thank goodness we left an open-ended comments section at the end, where you guys could put your finger on it:

If I was in charge of storytimes and could bend the universe to my will, I would change it to have 1 Lapsit, 2 Toddler and 2 Preschool storytimes each week, with Toddler and Preschool being back-to-back on the same morning. I find it easier to get set up and be enthusiastic for multiple storytimes in the same morning, rather than putting on just 1 storytime per day.

There is, of course, also the “repeat show” story time. Presenting more or less the same storytime 2 times in a row is easier than doing 2 completely different programs.

I’m answering the questions as if each storytime presented each week was completely different and not repeats or tweaks.

I think we also have to look at if these are unique storytimes, meaning is it the same storytime on bears presented 3 times or 3 separately themed or planned events. I think presenting the same program any number of times is much less stressful than coming up with multiple single use programs.

For me the questions go to not the number of storytimes but the number of preps. For example I do 3 sessions of toddler time and 2 sessions of mother goose. So a total of 5 storytimes. I would be willing do more of these programs but I would not want to add another age level.

The Thought Experiment questions are a little tricky to answer. If I presented the same storytime more than once (ex. I prepared one toddler storytime but offered it multiple times), then I could do many storytimes a week. Prepping several different storytimes would obviously be harder, especially if a craft or activity were a component.

Because of the number I do, I present the same story time material several times during the week. I vary the presentation/activity to accommodate the age group present.

If I were presenting the same storytime (same age groups, same theme/books), I could probably do more like 7 or 8 a week. But thinking about my schedule now, where I do sometimes 3 or 4 different preps a week, I went with 5. Which still might be crazy. Hard to say. Good question though!

I completely agree that whether you can present similar versions of the same storytime or if you must present all-fresh sequences makes a big difference in the number of storytimes that feel comfortable to take on. This is where the number of staff you have to provide storytimes can have a big impact on how you may arrange storytime responsibilities in ways that maximize prep time and minimize stress and burnout. And of course that is going to vary from library to library depending on the staff involved.

This is a good issue to keep in mind no matter how large your staff to use when you are negotiating the program schedule with your supervisor or coworkers. If you’re being asked to increase your storytime frequency, you might feel more comfortable saying yes if it’s understood (by your supervisor, by your publicity team/on your calendar, etc) that you will be presenting largely the same material at more than one session, or if you can agree that each staff will do all the storytimes one week and have the next week off rather than both providers giving storytimes every week. Or if you need to drop a session in order to add something new, which session would free up the most prep time if it weren’t on your schedule any more? Or whatever! The point being, this is a spot in which you can work to educate non-storytime-providers about the prep and energy storytime requires, and perhaps introduce a little gray area and points for potential compromise when a discussion about adding or dropping storytimes might initially feel more black-and-white.

More Storytime Workload posts about breaks, numbers of storytimes per week, and amount of other programming, here and at Libraryland.

So Lisa and I ran a very, very casual survey of storytime providers and she’s already written two great posts looking at the results, one about numbers of non-storytime programs per week and one about taking breaks.

I am finally catching up to her by giving us a look at the big numbers, the prime motivation for the survey: how many storytimes do we do on average every week?

So our survey divided out responders by how many hours a week they work overall, then asked how many storytimes they do on an average week. This was a quick and dirty set of questions and the numbers should be taken with a grain of salt as a result. We didn’t give specific instructions, so some people included their outreach events and some people didn’t; some people have a very regular weekly schedule, and some people don’t and kind of had to punt to give us a weekly number.

HOWEVER!

As of today, we have 130 responses all together, and here’s what we have:

PS I made this chart at http://nces.ed.gov/NCESKIDS/createagraph/default.aspx !

For 40 hour/week staff, the average storytimes per week was 2.82 (94 respondents)

For 30 hour/week staff, the average storytimes per week was 3.38 (8 respondents)

For 20 hour/week staff, the average storytimes per week was 2.38 (21 respondents)

For <20 hour/week staff, the average storytimes per week was 2.44 (9 respondents)

I thought it was interesting that the average for all staff was 2-3 per week (with a little bump for those few 30 hour folks, go you guys!)–given we had staff from small libraries *and* big libraries respond, and staff with varying levels of non-storytime responsibilities (though we didn’t have a way to track that, it came through anecdotally in the comments).

It certainly looks like there is a sweet spot here. Not only the averages, but the modes were right at 2-3 per week, too. What do you think? Is this what you expected to see?

Added later 3/27: I forgot to say that what was also interesting to me was that it didn’t matter how many hours a week you worked; the number of storytimes stayed about the same. This means though that percentage-wise, storytimes are filling up proportionately more of your week if you are part time than if you are full time. I wonder if this is an expectation reflected in job descriptions?

PS: Here are the raw numbers–Google didn’t give me tidy charts so read the captions carefully!

Storytime Per Person at 40 Hours a Week: First Column # of Storytimes, Second Column # of Responders

Storytime Per Person at 30 Hours a Week: First Column # of Storytimes, Second Column # of Responders

Storytime Per Person at 20 Hours a Week: First Column # of Storytimes, Second Column # of Responders

Storytime Per Person at less than 20 Hours a Week: First Column # of Storytimes, Second Column # of Responders

Thanks to all 114 (!) of you who have answered the Storytime Workload Survey so far! It has been so interesting to look at the numbers and read through your comments.

Lisa is getting us started talking about the results over at Libraryland–she also shares what she learned from touching base with folks at PLA.

We will be exploring more about the survey in further posts, so stay tuned. We’re making this up as we go along, so what do you want to know most? What are you curious about? Let us know!

To celebrate heading in to YEAR FOUR of Flannel Friday, Anne at So Tomorrow is inviting us to look back over ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY SIX round ups and choose our favorites. O impossible task!

Well, I did have fun poking around in our archives for an hour or two, and I pulled out one old idea, one newer idea, and one of my ideas to revisit for today’s party.

First, the old idea: Going way back to the first few months of Flannel Friday Round Ups, here’s Where Does This Go? from Miss Mary Liberry.

Here you show children four “places” and and then four types of transportation. Talking with the kids, decide which vehicle belongs in each place.

Reasons I love this:

You don’t have to memorize a rhyme or song
You don’t have to get the pieces up in any particular sequence
You encourage conversation and talking among the children
There’s room for open-ended questions
Great vocabulary building
You are helping children think critically about properties and categories
Can be adapted to younger toddlers by having them identify the vehicle and then you put it on the board yourself
This can be easily expanded to include more types of transportation
It can be easily transferred to different categories (seasons, habitats, etc)
You can re-use the pieces for other transportation rhymes
You could adapt this for a crowd (eg, make bigger “places” and multiple, smaller vehicles, and have all the cars come up to the board at once)
It lends itself to a passive tabletop experience in the library (pretty clear to know what to “do” with these pieces without written or verbal instructions)
There’s room to be as simple or as complex artistically as you want

Next, the new idea: The Groundhog Weather Game from Itsy Bitsy Mom, from January of this year.

In this flannelboard you sing a song, spin a spinner to choose a type of weather, put the corresponding felt weather icon on the board, talk about what types of weather it represents, and decide if a groundhog would see her shadow in that type of weather.

Reasons I love this:

It hits every damn one of the five early literacy ECRR practices: Reading and writing (on the spinner), singing (the spinner song), talking (about the weather), playing (spinning the wheel and taking turns), PLUS pinging on background knowledge (characteristics of types of weather) and critical thinking (would you see a shadow in this weather?)
It was inspired by a previous Flannel Friday post
Anne also borrowed from a preschool education idea site and a craft blog and blended everything into something fresh
There’s lots of room for adaptation: you could skip singing the song, or leave out the groundhog, or…
Can be adapted to younger toddlers by asking them if there is a sunshine on the icon (rather than if there are shadows in that weather)
Can be adapted for a crowd (multiple icons of each weather type)
You can reuse the pieces for a discussion activity with any book that has weather in it
The spinner takes a bit of construction but could be used for multiple programs/outreach activities
Read item #1 in this list again 🙂

Lastly, one Flannel Friday from Mel’s Desk: The Shoo Fly Pipe Cleaner Puppets.

Reasons I love this:

They are inexpensive and easy to replace
They encourage eye-hand coordination
They promote active listening (giving children something to do with their bodies while they sing)
They are a nice change of pace from finger puppets or shakey eggs
They still make me smile!

Thanks everyone and happy birthday!