Baby Storytime: Animal Movements

Posted on July 22, 2013 by Melissa

It’s been awhile since I posted a new baby storytime plan! This month we’re talking about Playing for our literacy messages, so a little make-believe seemed like a good fit.

OPENING SONG: Hello Song*

OPENING FINGERPLAY: Open Them Shut Them*

BOOK: Faster! Faster! by PATRICELLI
I can’t get enough of Leslie Patricelli and love this follow up to Higher! Higher!
Faster

BOUNCE: Trot Trot to Boston
“We just went faster than a dolphin, and an eagle, and a horse! Are you ready to ride a horse, too?” This is an old favorite. Bounce baby on your lap, gently dropping them between your legs when you say, “in.” I remind parents of young babies that they might be more comfortable bouncing facing in rather than facing out.

Trot trot to Boston
Trot trot to Lynn
Trot trot to grandma’s house
But don’t fall in!

ACTION RHYME: I Can Stretch
by me! Encourage the parents to gently move their babies to reflect the actions if they are too little to follow along themselves.

I can stretch like a kitten
I can hop like a frog
I can swim like a turtle
I can shake like a dog
I can sway like a snake
I can flap like a bat
I can reach like a monkey
I can move like that!

FLANNEL SONG: A Hunting We Will Go*
Today we used snake/cake and dog/log to go with our rhyme, plus house/mouse and fish/dish.

LITERACY TIP: Playing
Parents, when you play lap games and bounces with your baby, it makes them feel secure and happy because they are close to you. Their brains release endorphins which not only make them feel good, but actually can reinforce learning, too. In this case the learning includes hearing the sounds, rhymes, and words of our language, and helps lay the groundwork for becoming good talkers, readers, and writers later on.

BOOK: From Head to Toe by CARLE
I paperclip the pages so we wind up doing about half of the animals.
FromHeadtoToe

ACTION SONG: Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes
When you sing this with your babies, slow it down! Give their brains a chance to make connections between the words and the meanings.

Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes
Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes
Eyes and ears and mouth and nose
Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes

PUPPET SONG: Did You Ever See a Blackbird
I pulled out puppets to go along with some of the animals we saw and acted out today. You can use whatever works!

Did you ever see a blackbird, a blackbird, a blackbird,
Did you ever see a blackbird fly this way and that?
Fly this way, fly that way, fly this way, fly that way
Did you ever see a blackbird fly this way and that.

…a fishy swim this way and that
…a snake slither this way and that

ACTION RHYME: This is Big Big Big*

CLOSING SONG: Sneeze Game*

*Check out the My Baby Storytime page for the words and/or citations for these weekly activities!

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On Inventing What You Need (and the Storytime Guerrillas)

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Melissa

I am just now coming back to earth after a phenomenal ALA Annual Conference–it was in fact my very first Annual and was an utterly charmed and serendipitous experience and I have a million things to think and blog about. But the first blog post belongs to Guerrilla Storytime, which was one of the best parts.

StorytimeGuerilla2

Guerrilla Storytime is the brainchild of Cory Eckert, a youth services librarian from New Mexico. Some of us were chatting on Twitter about how much we’d love to see each other’s storytimes, to learn in person and from our peers and from real-life situations. From that grew Cory’s idea to use the Uncommons space at Annual to bring some of us together for just that purpose.

Which we did, and it totally rocked. Amy has an excellent write-up at her blog The Show Me Librarian, and I gathered a bunch of great tips and ideas that I will get into another post as soon as possible. But for this post, I want to report out in a different way. What I’ve found myself thinking about over the last few days is the importance of taking as active a role in your own learning as possible, and how easy it is to say that and how huge and overwhelming that can sometimes seem when you sit down to try to do it.

But how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Here’s some bites of advice that have gelled in my head this weekend about investing in your own learning and inventing what you need.

Don’t Do It Alone

As you move along in your career, do what you can to find a group of people that will help you with your learning. The more time I spend as a librarian, the more essential this step feels to me. Here we are in a profession that is all about resource sharing–look for those who will share their resources with you and who will appreciate the things that you bring to the table, too.

This group of people might be small or large or virtual or in-person or local or national or all of the above. You might find them at another branch of your system, or a local storytime training, or through your state library youth services interest group or a national listserv or on Twitter or Facebook. It may be a step out of your comfort zone to strike up conversations with someone new at a workshop or to send a private email with a follow-up question to someone on your listserv, but it’s worth it, because they will help you with the next piece of advice which is…

Keep Coming Back to Interesting Ideas

Bring up your crazy ideas to your friends and colleagues. Say, “I wish I could do this,” or “We tried this and it didn’t work and I don’t know why,” or “What if…” Then bring them up again. And again.

When Cory was first talking on Twitter about learning from peers, the first ideas we were kicking around were about using YouTube to share with each other. But, you know, copyright. Whatever. Kind of a dead end for some of the stuff we want to do. The whole project could have stalled there. But the next day she was back on Twitter saying, “You know, I think we should use the Uncommons at ALA.”

She kept at the idea, but it still could have languished if those of us listening hadn’t kept at it too. I’d never been at ALA so I didn’t know what the Uncommons was. I looked up, and came back to the conversation saying, “I think that could work, let’s keep thinking about this.” So we did, which brings us to the next step, which is…

Take Baby Steps

“Invent a totally new way to do storytime training at annual conferences” is kind of a huge thing for your to-do list. But that’s not actually what goes ON your to-do list. The to-do list for Guerrilla Storytimes looked more like this:

  • Open a shared Google doc to gather wish-list of training needs
  • Start an email group to share planning outside of 140-character tweets
  • Figure out how to sign up for Uncommons space

That seems a little more feasible, doesn’t it? Plus, when you have a group to work with, you never have to do everything on the list yourself, because you…

Ask For Help

Katie is local to Chicago and brought shaker eggs, a parachute, and scarves on the train so no one had to get them through airport security. Cate drove in to McCormick Place for her conference days and volunteered to put the props in her car so Katie didn’t have to lug them on the shuttle. Cory couldn’t be at both sessions so Amy volunteered to MC the Friday one. Kendra and Rick and Anna were ready to take on the first challenges and help break the ice. Everyone pitched in and took on a little piece, and they knew about the little pieces because we asked each other for help with them.

What do you need? Do you want to take more webinars but always have trouble with your equipment? Do you want to read more but aren’t sure where to find good articles? Or do you save lots of articles but need help organizing them, or talking about them? Do you never hear about good workshops until they are past? Identify what is a sticking point for you in moving forward with your learning, and ask your friends, your colleagues, your boss, your HR, your Twitter network, for help.

And asking for help is just one way to…

Be Visible

If you need help with something, chances others need help with it too. Take your learning public so others can join in. If you’ve found a great workshop, spread the word–maybe a coworker would like to go, too. If you find an awesome research article, tweet it or Facebook it or make a public Diigo list so others can read along. We all understand that not knowing everything is nothing to be ashamed of, and we can’t discover all the resources that will help us on our own.

The other reason to be visible has to do with advocacy. If you aren’t finding the training you need at your library, your boss should know that. If you are public about the expertise you are gaining in storytime practices, then others have a chance to learn that storytime requires expertise.

As our plans for Guerrilla Storytime came together, we tweeted about it, and slipped in a guest post on the ALSC blog, and talked it up in our own offline networks. We loved the location of the Uncommons–right in the middle of Registration, the Exhibit floor, the Starbucks, the First Time Attendee booth. As we hauled out the parachute and the guitars and ukuleles, as we sang songs into the mic and sat on the floor and stood in the doorway, all sorts of conference attendees got a peek at what we were doing. And it turned out that a LOT of us were there, which was very, very cool. But it almost didn’t matter, because we were ready to…

Define Success Broadly

There is no single path for learning or career development. Don’t waste time getting frustrated when one avenue doesn’t lead exactly where you thought. Was that webinar a little basic? Well, reviewing material is a great way to synthesize your thinking and develop new questions. Did that session not really stick to the topic you expected? Maybe now you know a little more about the surrounding issues. Did you not get into the online continuing ed class you wanted? Find another one for now and try again later.

I had no idea how to visualize what our Guerrilla Storytime sessions would look like. Seriously, I was thinking of a table with 6-8 people sitting around it, with maybe another 3-4 standing around looking on. Instead, we had 40, 50, 70, who knows how many over the two days. We took over the whole Uncommons (retroactive apologies to everyone else who wanted to use it quietly at the same time). But even if we had 10 instead of 50, I still would have called it a success, because we still would have shared ideas, and met each other, and celebrated storytime. We still would have invented what we needed, and we still would have been ready to…

Keep the Ball Rolling

The great thing about learning outside of school is being able to follow your interests wherever they lead, and not where your required course list wants you to go. Once you’ve tackled one workshop or class or article or discussion, think of one thing from that experience that you are still curious about and follow that thread to another workshop or class or article or discussion. Not only will that help keep you motivated in your job, but the next step often provides an opportunity to consolidate and really master what you just learned.

As you read this, the brains of Guerrilla Storytimers (those who planned, those who shared, those who attended, and yours too now that you’ve read this) are whirling with the next interesting ideas. Keep an eye on Twitter for the #guerrillastorytime hashtag for an ongoing stream of storytime tips. Would you like to see a blog for delving into storytime issues? Let me know…that’s another next step that’s percolating and we’ll need help. Want to bring Guerilla Storytime to your state library conference? You don’t need permission, just do it. Those of us who were at Annual will give you some help if you need it.

What’s your next step?

Other Post-Conference Posts, from the 2012 ALSC Institute:

On Finding What You Love (and the Great Peter Brown)
On Finding Your Tribe (and the TSA Agent)
On Customer Service (and the Southwest Skycap)

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Early Literacy Storytime: Mixed Up Mother Goose

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Melissa

We know that learning how rhymes “work” is a critical pre-reading skill. Nursery rhymes and Mother Goose songs are such a fabulous way to introduce rhymes and rhyme-play to children. But in addition to helping to boost “decoding” skills such as phonological awareness, nursery rhymes contribute to reading readiness in another way: by adding to a child’s background knowledge. The more nursery rhymes children know (from all of their language cultures) the more allusions and references they will be able to make sense out of in the stories that they read and listen to.

I had purchased the Wee Sing Mother Goose CDs for each of our branches, and was noodling around for some simple clip art images that might go along with…when I discovered that you can buy clip art on etsy. O.o

I found some GREAT sets from Little Red’s Clip Art

Little Bo Peep from Little Red's Clip ArtNursery Rhyme Combo from Little Red's Clip ArtBaa Baa Black Sheep from Little Red's Clip Art

Seriously, how adorable are these? PLUS you get your main characters in four different skin tones. <3

(She ALSO sells sets for folk tales, like 3 Pigs, Gingerbread Man, Riding Hood…plus Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel…wouldn’t these be great to laminate and leave out at a flannel board in your children’s room, for families to tell the stories to each other?)

ANYWAY, while I was looking at every single clip art set she had, I noticed this set, which she calls Say Goodnight.

Say Goodnight from Little Red's Clip Art

It’s a set of images that she made to go with the book Goodnight Moon…kittens, mittens, house, mouse, bear, chair. What I realized was that we could use these images mixed in with the Mother Goose images to play a Mixed Up Game in storytime.

I wrote and asked her if I needed to purchase a license if I were going to duplicate the sets for 8 branches and use them in public library storytimes, and she said no, so I bought all four sets. I copied a lot of the images into a Word doc so I could print the ones I wanted on our color printers, and laminated them. (NB: If you hot laminate your pieces, just be aware that will bump up your cost for these images a bit. I love hot laminate because it’s thicker, more durable, I can write on it easily with Sharpie, and Velcro buttons stick to it better than cold laminate, but sheesh it’s 60 cents a sheet if you can find it on sale.)

I laminated them and cut them out,

MotherGooseBox

sorted them,

IMG_5122

(despite help)

IMG_5121

and Velcro’d them and put them into sets for each branch. Now we can play Mixed Up Mother Goose!

The idea is that you start to say a rhyme while putting matching images on your flannelboard…but then you mess up and let the kids catch you.

“Hey Diddle Diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the sheep jumps over the moon?”

IMG_5124

“Oh my goodness, the sheep doesn’t jump over the moon, a COW jumps over the moon!”

Or, “Little Bo Peep has lost her kittens.”

IMG_5125

Or, “Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the socks.”

IMG_5126

You can start this game in a couple of ways, depending on the age of your kids or the amount of nursery rhyme knowledge they already have. If they are younger, or don’t know the rhymes very well yet, you can start by saying, “I have some favorite nursery rhymes to share with you today! The first one goes like this.” Then recite your first rhyme. Then say, “I have some pictures that go with, but they are all mixed up! Maybe you can help me sort them out.” Then say the rhyme again, putting the wrong picture up on the board. See if they catch you! If not, you’ll have to catch yourself. “Wait a minute, that’s not a cow!”

It could be kind of fun to link the rhymes together. For instance, say Jack Be Nimble with a sheep instead of a candlestick. Then you could say, “You know, there isn’t a sheep in THAT rhyme, but I know another rhyme with a sheep in it! It goes like this.” And share Little Bo Peep or Baa Baa Black Sheep or Mary Had a Little Lamb with them next.

With older children, or kids who know the rhymes pretty well, you can just start to recite the rhymes and get the wrong pictures and the wrong words mixed in. For instance, “Baa Baa Brown Bear have you any mittens?”

Play it a few times, then afterwards, tell the parents and adults, “The more rhymes you and your child play games with and learn by heart, the more they add to their cultural awareness and background knowledge. Knowing who Miss Muffet is or what happens to the Itsy Bitsy Spider will help them understand what’s going on when these characters’ names or actions appear in other stories that they read. Singing and playing with your child will help them get ready to read!”

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Announcing the Bell Awards!

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Melissa

(aka Why Mel Hasn’t Posted Much of Anything for Two Months Now)

Thanks to my brilliant friend and colleague Carol Edwards, I have had the amazing opportunity this year to help launch a new picture book initiative, the CLEL Bell Picture Book Awards.

CLEL-Bell-final

CLEL is Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy and is an advocacy group I’ve been a part of for several years. One day after a meeting, Carol and I were standing in the parking lot–still talking about literacy stuff–and she said, “You know what we should do? CLEL should start an early literacy picture book award.” And here we are a year and a half later, and that’s exactly what we did!

If you missed one of our 645 listserv announcements last month, you can find out more about the project at the CLEL website.

What we hope to do is to recognize the picture books that provide strong support of young children’s early literacy development, by celebrating books that thematically feature reading, writing, singing, talking, and playing, and that lend themselves to modeling and supporting those great activities that get grown-ups and kids engaged with each other. We know that engagement, interaction, and conversation is so powerful in boosting young children’s reading readiness! Our first awards will be announced on February 5, 2014.

But we don’t just want to announce our winning titles once a year–we want to help librarians, parents, childcare providers, preschool teachers, anyone really, discover robust new titles all year long, and provide a place for us to talk about what makes them so great for sharing with children and families.

So I have an invitation for you! Once a week on the CLEL blog we will be featuring one of the titles that has been nominated for the award. We’d love for you to visit the blog, and let us know what you like or don’t like about the book in the comments! Have you read it in storytime? How did it go? Did you read it to your nieces and nephews? Share it with your preschool classroom? Did it inspire any fun conversations with the children you shared it with? Was it a complete dud? Can you think of some fun activity ideas connected to the book that boost early literacy skills? All this information is valuable–not only to the selection committee who will be considering the title for the award, but to other readers who are choosing and using books with young children. Your voice is important!

And what if you’ve found a great book on your new book shelf that isn’t on our nominations list yet? Guess what? You can nominate titles too! We just ask that you tell us a little bit about the connections you see between your title and early literacy skills and practices.

We are so excited about this project and hope you will be too. Your participation is crucial to our vision and goals! The more folks we have talking and thinking about these books, the more we will be able to spread the early literacy word, both in and outside of libraries.

Here’s where you can help!

Nominate a title

This week’s blog post–about Emily Gravett’s Again!

See what’s been nominated so far–we’re just getting started!

Any questions? Just ask!

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Being with Kids

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Melissa

My daughters volunteer once a month in the preschool classroom at our church. Yesterday my 15 year old told me, “One of the boys was really cute today. We were taking the kids upstairs to watch the baptism in church, but he didn’t understand. He kept saying, ‘Where are we…? What’s happening to…? What are we…?'”

He was so mixed up he couldn’t even finish a question!

My daughter said she told him, “Here, hold my hand. We’ll both go up.” And he immediately stuck out his hand to take hers.

What a great little reminder about how to be with kids. When they have questions, we try not to say, “You don’t need to know,” or “Just do it this way,” or “I’ll tell you.”

We say, “Let’s figure it out together.”

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What I’m Reading: Speech Therapy Blogs

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Melissa

Don’t you love it when you discover a whole new world to learn about?

This month, our storytime providers are sharing tips with parents and caregivers about the early literacy practice of “talking.” So I’ve been surfing, on the lookout for new ideas for storytime activities and fun research to share. I was specifically looking for information about “expressive” vocabularies, or the words that we can say ourselves (not just the words we understand when we hear them).

One of the things I came across was a great post from a speech therapist’s blog: Child Talk: Building Language in the Bathtub.

bathtub button

Becca says,

Bathtubs can be a wonderful place to build language! Why? Because one of the most powerful ways to build language is inside of routines, especially those routines that occur on a daily basis. What’s more, many children love bath time! The only thing better for language than a routine is a routine that children truly love. As a bonus, bath time is something that is already built into the day – no need to buy any new toys or find time to sit on the floor and play. As parents, we can create many teachable moments inside something we are already doing, almost every day.”

The rest of the post is filled with practical, doable advice for encouraging language and communication during a bath. What struck me is how much of it sounds like stuff we already do (or could do) in storytime, especially in terms of how we articulate routines, respond to and expand on what children say, and those great open-ended dialogic reading questions.

In addition, I really enjoyed reading articles in her “Tips” section on the left sidebar. I learned about the different kinds of talk we can engage in with young children, and how to use choices and set up “communication temptations” to entice a child to practice using words. She even has posts on using books to encourage language! This is all super advice that I can pass on to parents and caregivers. I’ve added her to my blogroll and am eager to go back and read the rest of her posts.

Then a lightbulb went off in my head and I remembered that Anne had sent me a link to a different blog by another speech language pathologist, but I had not read much beyond that one post. So I headed over to Playing with Words 365 and was blown away by all the information there.

PWWbannerAug2012

Katie has a great page called “Speech and Language 101” with links to all of her developmental articles–what to expect at each stage birth-5 years.

She also has a series of posts on Top Toys that encourage language development, and she addresses sign language questions, and in her section for other Speech Language Pathologists, she has posts on therapy activities–which look a lot like storytime or preschool program ideas to me. AND she talks about using books to extend language skills. What’s not to love?

Obviously these are only 2 of about a million speech therapy blogs, but I’ve found them to be very helpful. I’ve learned new vocabulary, techniques, and concepts, and I love looking at early literacy from a slightly different point of view.

Do you follow any speech therapy blogs?

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Oh No! a Book Talk Technique for Dig In to Reading

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Melissa

A few months ago, I was able to participate in a Book Talk Week at my daughters’ old elementary school library. I visited with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade groups, and I wanted to do something a little different. I had fallen in love with Oh No! by Candace Fleming and Eric Rohmann, especially how the story began on the front cover, incorporated the endpapers and title page, and continued seamlessly to the first page of the story. I thought there was a lot to uncover about the story separate from the text and thought it would be fun to explore together.

Oh No

So I brought it in a big envelope & didn’t show it to the group. I also brought the first two verses of the text typed out on a piece of paper. I started by talking with the kids about some of the information we can learn about a book by looking at the cover (character, setting, mood, etc), but told them we weren’t going to look at a cover first today! Instead, I told them the title, and we thought about the title together and talked about if we knew anything more about the story now. (A little maybe about the type of story, they decided, but not about setting or characters.)

Then I read the first two verses from my typed paper, and when I was done we talked some more about what we knew NOW about the story (they decided that they knew at least one character, and that the setting had a hole–but when I asked about that, they realized the hole could be in a city, or in the country). We guessed whether there would be more characters in the story, and they guessed where the setting might be, and finally I took the book out of the envelope and we looked at the cover together, and talked about what additional information we had about the story and setting and characters. (Oh! It’s going to be a hole a jungle. Where is the jungle? Well, that looks like bamboo, doesn’t it? Where does bamboo grow?) There’s a tiger, and definitely some other animals as characters too. We talked about if the tiger was going to be friendly or not, and how we could tell.

When I opened the cover, we spent some MORE time looking at the end papers, figuring out what was happening already in the story, wondering where the hole was that they had heard me read about. We turned to the title page, and I pointed out how the title works as the first line of the story.

They had so many great things to say and solid predictions to make. FINALLY we settled in and I read the whole thing. When I was done with the text, I asked if that felt like the end of the story. Some said yes, some said no…and I turned the last page so we looked at the end papers, and saw those orange stripey paws pulling the tiger out of that hole! Oh no!

The kids did a great job thinking critically about the book, and I heard later from the teachers that they loved having a “mystery book” at their library visit. It was a VERY fun discussion for me to lead and we got to pay attention to different parts of the physical book (end papers, cover, title page, jacket flaps, copyright info) as well as parts of the narrative (setting, characters, conflict, resolution).

I was thinking that this might work with a number of new titles (“new” because I do think it would work best with one most of the kids haven’t seen yet) and tell the kids you are going to Dig Into a Book together. This could be expanded into a full program, either by “uncovering” a couple of “mystery” books together, or adding in a related craft or extension activity after your discussion. Or you could do this for your school promotional visit for Summer Reading. Or you could make a Dig Into Books–What Will You Discover? display, and cover up some great picture books or chapter books with brown paper, and write the first sentence or the first paragraph on the wrapper. (This is a borrowed idea from the Blind Date with a Book Displays!)

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(Not a) Flannel Friday: Cake Circles & Clothespins

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Melissa

Over on Pinterest, there are 9 bazillion clothespin activities for preschoolers, which usually involve having kids clip marked clothespins onto matching buckets, cups, or pieces of cardboard…the blue clothespin to the blue cup, for example, or the clothespin with a capital A on it to the lower case A written on the cardboard strip.

This type of thing is a lot of fun because it’s a kinesthetic, play-based way for kids to explore different concepts, and boost fine motor skills besides. I liked the idea so much I wanted to offer a clothespin activity to our storytime providers. And I wanted every child to be able to manipulate the clothespins, not just watch the leader do it. Which meant I needed 25 pieces of sturdy cardboard times 8 library branches…so, yes, it’s true, I ordered 500 six-inch cardboard cake circles from a bakers’ supply company. How fun is my job?

For my first set I chose farm animals, because I knew “animals” would be a more accessible idea to a broader age range than letters, shapes, colors, or numbers. It also fits in a number of different storytime themes: Farm, of course, but also Noisy & Quiet, or Big & Small, or just tucked into storytime after a book featuring one of those animals. In Word, I created a 6″ circle shape. I found some darling clip art animals in Microsoft Word, and placed them around the edge of the circle, and printed them out in color.

cakecircle

Then it was a matter of cutting out the paper circles and gluing them to the cardboard…a great job for a volunteer, if you have one. (Or you could bring them home and make your girls help you with assembly while you all watch Dr. Who.)

If you don’t want to or can’t purchase the cake circles, you can certainly use chipboard cereal or soda boxes from your recycle bin, and make strips instead:

horizontalstripfront

horizontalstripback

Now, what do you do with these guys? Give every child a board and a clothespin. Tell the grownups that the children should try to move the clothespins themselves, using the pads of their first finger and thumb. If the kids can’t squeeze hard enough with their fingertips, the parents should help them out. Then try one of these activities:

  • Sing Old MacDonald or Fiddle-I-Fee. Tell your group that they need to listen carefully, and when they hear you sing an animal, to move their clothespin to the matching picture.
  • Play a Guessing Game. Give the children clues for each animal (“I’m thinking of an animal that is white, and says ‘baaa,’ and gives us wool for clothes.”) and when they guess, move the clothespin. Encourage them to talk it over with their grown-up!
  • Read a Book. On the Farm by David Elliot has great pictures, and a very short poem for each of a number of farm animals. You could just read the poems that match the pictures on your boards. Or you could read a book like Spot Goes to the Farm by Eric Hill, and have the children listen and move their clothespins if they see a picture of a matching animal.

    What else could you do?

    I still have 300 cake circles left, so I’m planning my next sets already. Maybe things that go, or good things to eat…can’t wait to figure it out!

The round-up is at Loons and Quines this week, all the way over in Scotland! *waves at LQ*

You can find all things Flannel Friday over here.

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My Unintentional Hiatus (with Bonus Crowdsourced Train Song)

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Melissa

Yikes, that was a long gap in posts! I had thought I would have a little breathing room between “end of the winter quarter” and “end of school year mayhem,” but April went by in a hurry over here. I’m really hoping to get back on track for May. In the meantime, here’s a fun thing that happened on Twitter on Monday.

I had learned a new-to-me storytime song last week during a webinar from Cen at @LittleeLit: “This Train Is Going to the City.” You can listen to a version here. There is nothing like learning a new song to put me in a good mood! And of course once I heard it I immediately started to dream up new verses. When I shared a couple of them on Twitter, Amy and Lauren and Kary joined in. We came up with so many verses that I couldn’t resist reporting out.

Here’s the first verse:

This train is going to the city, this train
This train is going to the city, this train
This train is going to the city,
Where the lights are oh so pretty
This train is going to the city, this train

Here’s what we came up with. Thanks @choosejoytoday @laurengsnell @MissKaryReads! And thanks @billyhank for the otters.

This train is going to the jungle / where the monkeys jump and tumble

This train is going to the mountains / where waterfalls all splash like fountains

This train is going to the library / come gather round and listen to the story

This train is going to the forest / where birdies chirp and sing in chorus

This train is going to the shore / where the sleepy walrus snores

This train is going to the river / where the otters shake and shiver

This train is going to the zoo / where flamingoes are pink and the sky is blue

What verses can you add?

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A Cappella and CDs In Storytime

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Melissa

One question that comes up again and again when I talk with people about storytime is the best way to include music. Recently Julie, Anna, and Kendra all wrote great posts about singing in storytime. (Special thanks to Julie, who wrote that post as a direct favor to me when I needed some help. Superstar!) [Update 3/28: Lisa has a great post on this topic, too! Update 4/10: ALSO Katy has a detailed post and lots of good thoughts!]

As it happens, I have a lot of opinions about this (are you surprised?) but also as it happens, I use both music CDs and a cappella singing in my baby storytimes. When I was first starting out with baby storytime, I borrowed a structure and basic outline from some colleagues, and have found myself sticking to it over the years. Over time I’ve experienced and heard some pros and cons for each method, so I thought I’d list them and see what you have to add.

Playing CDs

PROS of using recorded music in storytime:

  • Allows me to toss out comments to the kids as we’re moving and dancing
  • Can share a greater range of music styles or melodies than my limited vocal range can support (can also share songs in languages you don’t speak)
  • Introduces great artists, songs, and CDs to storytime families
  • Provides support to less-confident singers

CONS of using recorded music in storytime:

  • Limits me to what’s on the CD–I can’t add in verses or take suggestions from the kids
  • One more prop to shuffle and manage during storytime
  • Songs are often too long for storytime

Singing A Cappella

PROS of singing without a CD in storytime

  • Models to parents and caregivers that they don’t need CDs to share music with their kids
  • Allows you to make up any old words to a familiar tune to suit your storytime
  • Can adjust performance on the fly: slower, shorter, quicker, longer, etc.
  • No plugs or equipment to fail (unless you have laryngitis!)

CONS of singing without a CD in storytime

  • Might not have enough breath support to project to a group a cappella
  • Might not include music at all without a CD as backup

What would you add to any of these lists?

Here’s my bottom line: If someone held my out-of-print hardback copy of The Baby Goes Beep hostage and forced me to choose just one way of adding music to my storytimes, I would hand over my CDs in a heartbeat.

For me, the benefits of having the grown-ups see me embrace imperfect singing (forgetting tunes, messing up the words, having a ball belting it out regardless), and the flexibility afforded to my storytimes by singing without a CD or MP3 player, are too powerful to give up.

But I’d love to hear your experience, and hear what your bottom line is, too! Do you have recommendations for CDs that work well in storytime? How do you manage your music equipment? Do you have advice for those who are less confident going solo? Where do you learn new songs to sing? And I haven’t even talked about playing instruments in storytime! What do you play?

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