Storytime Questions and Storytime Goals

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.