Mel's Desk

At our ALSC presentation, we shared what our answers to the Big Storytime Questions were, in the form of our storytime competencies, our observation forms, and our training sequence, all of which are derived from our library’s strategic direction and our thinking through to some storytime goals.

At the end, one question from the audience was, “How did you have the time to do all of this?”

Lori’s answer was a reminder that we didn’t do all of this thinking and developing at once; in fact, we’ve been working on this stuff for years. My answer was, our district supports how the work we do aligns with our strategic direction, and provides us the staff time to do this kind of foundational work.

Those are both true! But the next day I was kicking myself because I realized what we should have emphasized along with those answers.

Yes, we’ve been lucky to have been given time and staff to work on this initiative. But if you don’t have a lot of time, or a lot of staff, you can still get started on doing this work. Take the first step, start small, and tackle one question or one thing to change about storytime. Piece by piece you can work through all the hows and whys of storytime at your library. Write a paragraph about where you’d like your storytime service to go; keep notes on what you’ve decided and why. Whenever you have an opportunity to send a staff member to a training, or your boss gives you a chance to change up your storytime schedule, or to hire a new staff person, or survey your patrons, you’ll have an idea what direction to move in.

Don’t ever get discouraged by how big the task feels or how much you want to do. This is true of any huge project, and it’s true of improving storytimes at your library. There will never be a real end to this process, will there? There will always be new staff members to train, new groups in your community to serve, new research or data to reflect upon and incorporate into your services.

So jump in, get started! Don’t second guess yourself too much. Every step is a good one.

(Thanks Kendra for the title of this post!)

So last week I asked you to weigh in on the questions Lori and I asked during our ALSC session. The questions are:

Why does your library have storytime?
What makes a good storytime?
What’s an important quality in a storytime provider?
What would you change about storytime at your library?

and one bonus question that occurred to me later:

How can you tell when a storytime was successful?

I think all of your responses are amazing and I appreciate the time you took to add to the conversation!

I said the fifth question was actually a trick question, and that’s of course because whether a storytime is successful or not depends on your goals for storytime. I could perform the same exact storytime in two different libraries, and one library could consider it a good storytime and the other could consider it a poor storytime, and they could both be right…depending on what is important to each library.

Say you observed a storytime that consisted of someone reading picture books to the children for 45 minutes. If your main view of storytime is that it is to present a wide variety of rich language experiences through books, songs, rhymes, games, and interactive conversations, then you’d think this storytime was a fail. But what if your view of storytime was that it is to present as much high-quality picture book literature to the children as possible? Then your assessment of that same storytime has to shift.

Here’s another example. Say you observed a storytime that presented a wide variety of oral storytelling, songs, action rhymes, and fingerplays–but no books–to 150 children and some parents (while other parents were browsing elsewhere in the library). If your goals for storytime included fostering language development, providing enjoyable programs, and serving as many families as possible, this is a success. If your goals are modeling picture-book-reading techniques, reaching parents with early literacy information, and building one-on-one relationships with families, this method is not as effective.

Sharing how we’ve tied our storytime goals to competencies is what our session was about, but there are no right answers. In Celia Huffman’s great session at ALSC, “Planning for Excellence: Developing Best Practices for Youth Services,” she said, “Best practices are contextual. They are not the same for everyone!”

This is why asking the Big Storytime Questions is such a valuable exercise. Studying your own answers allows you to start to formulate your own storytime philosophy. Once you’ve identified what’s important about storytime for you or your library, then you can start to explore how to get better at doing meeting those critical needs.

OK, you’ve actually already answered all the questions Lori and I asked at our ALSC session. Thank you for all the thoughtful responses! But as I was scheduling these posts, ANOTHER Big Storytime Question occurred to me, so I’m slipping it in here at the end:

How can you tell when a storytime was successful?

This is a trick question, by the way…let’s hear your answers and we’ll talk about why it’s a trick question next week!

It’s Big Storytime Question Week! Here are Questions One, Two, and Three.

The final question my boss and I asked at our ALSC presentation was:

What would you change about storytime at your library?

If you were in charge, what would you do? If you ARE in charge, what changes have you made and why?

Here’s what the session attendees wrote:

More participants [x2…checked off by a second person]
Less chaos
Longer time for class
Dedicated children’s staff
Bigger space
More funding for program needs
More music
More dancing
Education of Library Assistants to improve presentation quality
After coming here, EVERYTHING! [We were in the last session group, and ALL of the sessions before us rocked and were loaded with ideas.]
More collaboration
High quality & consistency between branches and staff
Written district expectations
Thoughtfulness about WHY we do what we do
Innovation
More adult (parent, caregiver teacher) participation
More songs and fingerplays
Registration vs. open drop-in?
Provide more support for my staff
Building morale of Library Assistants who don’t think they get paid enough to do storytime

The Big Storytime Questions this week are the questions Lori and I posed at the beginning of our ALSC session…we had great responses from the attendees but I’m always ready to hear more! Check out Question #1 and Question #2 and then let us know your response to Question #3:

What is an important quality in a storytime provider?

Here’s what folks wrote at our session:

Flexibility
Love kids
Excitement of literature
Must LIKE (and be comfortable around) children
FUN! / good energy & association with children
Smile-happy-enjoys being with children
Enjoy books
Willing to try new things and evaluate what works well
Library enthusiast
Musical
Makes participants feel safe so they can try new things
Flexibility [yes, again!]
Creativity
Make stories come alive!
Love what they do
Love of children and books
Willing to swallow your pride to provide the most engaging program

Let us know what you think!

This week I’m inviting you guys to share your answers to the storytime questions my boss and I raised in our ALSC presentation last week! The first question was, “Why does your library have storytime?”

The second question is:

What makes a good storytime?

And here’s the answers from the session:

Laughter
Happy kids and parents
Music (x2…a second person checked this too after it was written down!)
Grounded in early literacy skill building–delivered in a FUN way
Organization
Movement–dancing, fingerplays
Fun/fun/more FUN
Planning
Puppets, flannels
Engaged children
Mixture of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, song
Participation
Active participation
Books you love
Parents and kids participating
Engages parents/caregivers, too
Joy of books, reading
Excitement about books
More books checked out

What do YOU think?

I just got back from the amazing ALSC Institute and my brain is buzzing with all sorts of things to share with you (so much so that I’ve already today posted a draft that I meant to go live later this week, which I will fix as soon as I can) but the first thing I wanted to do was share some of the links and resources that my boss Lori and I wound up mentioning or referring to in our presentation on storytime competencies & training, and that I should have had the foresight to put on a handout for everyone. If you weren’t at our session, no worries! I still think these are good resources in general and this is as good an excuse as any to put them out there again.

Maryland Public Library Peer Coaching

MPL implemented peer coaching as a way for their storytime providers to help each other improve their storytime skill sets. This link will take you to a PLA article that describes the process as well as shares sample forms. We looked at these materials when we were first starting to think about our own storytime training & mentoring.

Early Literacy Storytimes @ your library

This handbook, by Saroj Ghoting and Pamela Martin-Diaz, describes what literacy-based storytimes are and how to get started. My library has been using it for 6 years now as a training reference. The authors include sample observation forms to help you become accustomed to identifying early literacy skills in storytimes & these also informed the ones we created. There’s a sample of one of their forms here.

Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy

One of the ways we try to support our storytime providers at my library is by sending out a monthly newsletter. These are in-house documents that share logistical details and resources. In addition, each month I’ve been including a short article with a little more information how the five Every Child Ready to Read practices of reading, writing, singing, talking, and playing connect and support the 6 early literacy skills of phonological awareness, print awareness, print motivation, vocabulary, narrative skills, and letter knowledge. Someone asked if these newsletters were posted anywhere or could be shared. The newsletters themselves are not publicly available, but we were able to share the content of the early literacy articles with the advocacy group Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy, which Lori and I are both affiliated with. CLEL added the content to their website, and you can read it here. (There’s also some information about the 6 skills that I helped put together, and I think that’s worth a look as well; don’t miss the “Read more about the 6 skills!” menu block on the right hand side for even more content.)

Dr. Jill Stamm

Recently our library invited Dr. Jill Stamm to speak to our community and give a presentation to our staff, and Lori and I both mentioned things we learned from Dr Stamm as part of our presentation. Dr. Stamm is a founder of the New Directions Institute, and wrote a book about children’s brain development, Bright from the Start, that we highly recommend.

Change the First Five Years and You Change Everything

One attendee asked if we had any recommendations for online training resources that they could use to motivate their staff, especially staff who were reluctant to engage with the early literacy material or were less open to learning from or with their peers. There are so many good resources available–I really need to be better about spotlighting what I do find here on Mel’s Desk. But the first thing that came to my mind in answer to her question was a video I included in a short district-wide training we put together. While this video isn’t strictly about early literacy or Every Child Ready to Read, we heard from many of our staff, both frontline and support services, that it helped them “get it” and understand why our district is so excited about and committed to providing early childhood programs and services. It may be an effective way for you to start a conversation too, or to plant a seed somewhere in your community. It’s from the great Ounce of Prevention Fund and it’s called “Change the First Five Years and You Change Everything.” Have a tissue ready!

Well, my boss and I survived our ALSC presentation on Saturday and it was a lot of fun. As part of our session, we had attendees write short answers to questions about storytime we had put on the wall on that big sticky chart paper. I appreciated everyone who participated in this and stepped forward to share their thoughts, because I love listening to people talk about storytime. And I wanted to hear what you would have written if you were there too! So this week I’m going to be posting our questions, and can’t wait to hear what your answers are!

Our first question:

Why does your library have storytime?

Go!

[update, 9/24 evening] PS. I’m a nut. I sent this to post before I could add in the answers from the group. Thanks to everyone who added comments already! Here’s what folks at the session had to say:

To help get children ready to start school
To open a world of imagination
Children are future patrons/taxpayers
To help youngsters learn interaction with others/school prep
Start love of library and reading [at] early age
Encourage library users
Get kids ready for school
Encourage kids and parents to use the library together and read together
As part of Outreach–as a service to the community
Why not?
Start (or continue) kids’ love of books, language, etc.
Early literacy modeled for parents
Print motivation
To help parents understand their role as their child’s first teacher
To grow lifelong library users/lovers
Make learning fun
Early literacy/reason we exist