Books:
Just Ducky by Kathy Mallat
Animals on the Farm: Ducks by Wendy Strobel Dieker
Quack and Count by Keith Baker
Goose Needs a Hug by Tad Hills

Opening Activity: Quick! Touch your toes, eyes, ears, tummy, knees, floor, clap your hands!

Sing: Welcome Song: If you are ready for a story, clap your hands!

Parent Welcome: Thank you for joining us in Storytime today! Every child, like adults, has a bad day, so if you child is needing a break, please step outside the room with them so they can calm down and not disrupt the other children. However, when your child is ready, please rejoin us again! Also, pretend there is an invisible circle around my easel. This is where I have lots of our props. If your child goes inside this circle, please gently pull them back so they do not block the view for the other children. Let’s get started!

Introduce topic: Look at the books I have! What do you guess we will be talking about today? Ducks? Yes! And, what sound do ducks make? “Quack, quack, quack!  Can you say that with me?

Read: Just Ducky by Kathy Mallat

This is a very sweet book. Duck needs a friend to play with, but all his friends, Bee, Mouse, and Frog, are busy. He goes for a swim and finds his reflection in the water. Thinking it is another duck, they play together all day. The older kids in Storytime got that he was just playing with his own reflection, which made it fun. I also had a bee, mouse, and frog puppet, so I gave those out to three of the kids in Storytime, and they held it up when it was their page.

Possible Aside for parents: Missed the aside this week! Whoops!

Write: I wrote the letter D on our white board, and asked if the kids knew the letter, and what sound the letter made. I then wrote the word, “Duck” below the T. For fun, I asked the kids to help me find the letter D in the word duck. I pointed at the u, then the c, then the k, to the kids great amusement, and then I finally pointed to the letter D. Kids like it when adults make mistakes and they can correct them, and what a great way to reinforce letter recognition. I then asked the kids what other words began with a “D” sound. We had lots of nonsense words, all beginning with a “D” sound, which made it fun.

Read and Talk: Animals on the Farm: Ducks by Wendy Strobel Dieker

Good non-fiction books for early readers about Ducks. Pictures show different colored feathers, and we had a discussion about the oil on duck’s feathers help the ducks float. The book also gave a new vocabulary word for many of us. A drake is a male duck. Femail ducks are just called ducks.

Sing:
-Popcorn Kernels,
-1, 2 Shake it on Your Shoe,
-Scarves up!

Read:  Quack and Count by Keith Baker

I asked the kids to show me 7 fingers. 5 + 2=7. We had to count them all to make sure. As we read through the book, I asked the kids to continue showing me on their fingers all the ways we could make 7. It did not always work out perfectly, but it was an early math introduction through a book.

Read: Goose Needs a Hug by Tad Hills

Very good, and quick, board book to end Storytime on. At the end, I asked the kids to give a hug to the “big person who brought you to Storytime”. Lots of smiles.

Closing Song: Tickle the Stars

How it went:
Ducks are a fun Storytime theme! All the kids loved making duck noises. I really need to work on my flannelboards. I know that there are many fun activities we can do with them in this theme, so that is my goal.

For the past two months, we have been experimenting with picture book displays above our picture book shelves. I had been using this space for new books, but after a large weeding project, I realized how many wonderful books we already own! These books deserve some face time too so that parents and kids can discover them. In March, we celebrated National Puppy Day (March 23rd) all month long by displaying our puppy and dog books all throughout March. We began with 80 puppy and dog books. Because our check out is three weeks, we do not code these books any differently than regular books, because by the time the display books are returned, we are prepping for our next display. So, when they are returned, we just shelve them back into the regular collection. When I took the Puppy display down yesterday, we had only 30 that had not been checked out. For April, I asked one of our library interns to go through the picture book collection and pull anything that was related to books, reading, or libraries.  I added all these books to a list in our library software so that next year we can  refer to the list and pull the books without going through every book in the picture book collection to find them again.

For April, I decided to celebrate Drop Everything and Read all month long! For more information, visit: http://www.dropeverythingandread.com/NationalDEARday.html.  I asked one of our library interns to go through the picture book collection and pull anything that was related to books, reading, or libraries.  I added all these books to a list in our library software so that next year we can  refer to the list and pull the books without going through every book in the picture book collection to find them again.

Here is a snapshot of what our book display looks like. 🙂

Downloads:
April-D.E.A.R Poster (PowerPoint)
April-D.E.A.R  Poster (PDF)

Just how hard is it to build a bridge? Well, I think our library kids can best answer that question. What I do know is that planning a Kids’ STEM Workshop around bridge building using Legos and Engino toys to help reinforce the B.A.T.S. design that all bridges utilize was super easy, and super fun!

The skinny: This was a wonderful, relaxed program that cost us $0. The Engino toy parts and Legos we used were proved to us through a grant and by gift from our Friends of the Library. We already had these resources, so it made sense to me to feature them as a STEM program. Again, if you do not have these materials, then this may be a great idea for a grant project. I hope this lesson plan helps spark every better ideas you can use in your grant proposal for how you plan to use these materials in your community!

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“Kangaroo, Egg, Fawn, Lemur”
No-Theme Storytime
Just fun stories that could be shared anytime during the year! 

Books:
First the Egg by Laura Vaccaro Seeger
Pouch! by David Ezra Stein
Kangarros by Mari Schuh
A Fawn in the Grass by Joanne Ryder
Follow Me! by Ellie Sandall

3rd Week of February Storytime
The Hat: Week 2

Books: 
My Heart is Like a Zoo by Michael Hall
A Hat for Minerva Louise by Janet Morgan Stoeke
Jingle-Jangle by Nicola Smee
The Hat by Jan Brett

Flannel board: 

This week I was able to use our “Hat” themed flannel board one of our library interns made! The kids loved it! I did this at the end of Storytime instead of reading the book. I simply held the book up and introduced the story. Using the flannel board pieces, I told the story o f “the Hat”. Even the youngest kids were attentive, and mesmerized at how the pieces “moved” as the story progressed. To help me, I also used one of our puppets which looks like a hedgehog and a red and white sock that I brought from home.

Green Storytime (Week of Saint Patrick’s Day)

Books:
Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss
I Spy book (I just found a page that had green objects, and we played, “Can you find something green on this page?)
Green by Laura Vaccaro Seeger
Where is the green Sheep? By Mem Fox

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With spring in the air, this was a fun way for one of our library interns to beautify the wall above our picture book collection. The butterflies were made with our die cut machine. Our intern cut out each die cut butterfly in two different colors of paper, and then hot glued the butterflies together to make them 3-D.

Wow! Give kids a challenge (and don’t tell them that it is hard) and watch them create for you! That is the lesson I learned by offer a STEM program using Engino toy parts to build simple machines. Our kids both followed the directions, and free built. Engino toy parts are a cross between Legos and Knex, and they are a little bit harder to work with than either of those toys. Lots of fine motor skills were needed. I ran this program with 5^th graders, 2^nd graders, and an all ages program. All of the groups were able to build the simple Experimental Car, and then enjoyed some free build time.

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With Saint Patrick’s Day approaching, our staff wanted to have a fun craft for the kids as a passive program. Here is what they came up with! Enjoy!

In the mood for a Dr. Seuss Storytime! Me too! With Read Across America Day coming up, why not celebrate!

It can be hard to find Seuss books that are short enough for a Storytime crowd. In the end, I chose:

Dr. Seuss’s ABC
Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?
Hop on Pop ( I read pages 1-31, ending with, “No Pat No, Don’t Sit on That!”)
Green Eggs and Ham (I read pages 1-25 and then skipped to page 49 and read till the end.)
My Many Colored Days

How it went: 

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Sometimes, the easiest Passive Programs are the best. In February, we just left out a craft station with some paper, pink hearts cut from our die-cut machine, crayons, and some glue sticks. Kids LOVED this station! So easy, so simple, and so very sweet when they even thought to give the librarian at the desk a Valentine!

2^nd Week of February Storytime
The Hat: Week 1

Books:

If You’ll be My Valentine by Cynthia Rylant
Biscuit’s Valentine’s Day by Alyssa Satin Capucilli
The Hat by Jan Brett
Ten on the Sled by Kim Norman (We did not get to this book this week)

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The benefits of play time for children has been long researched, observed, and promoted by educators, doctors, teachers, and librarians. Written in 2012, this article, “The Importance of Play, Particularly Constructive Play, in Public Library” written by Sue McCleaf Nespeca and published by the American Library Association is an excellent resource for making the case for the importance of play.

Play is even one of the five “magic” words in early child literacy (Write, Talk, Read, Sing, and Play) that we promote in our Storytimes and early literacy education. However, it can be one of the more difficult ones to bring out in the library in our regular Storytime (and similar program) sessions. So how we do add more play time to our library programming? I believe that children’s programs work best when they work as family programs that bring the family together, and families together. To that end, how can Play Time not only promote early literacy, healthy social skills, but also build relationships between child parents and caregivers at the same time?

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