Anyway, this time we’re reading:

Snowballs by Lois Ehlert

A Winter Day by Douglas Florian

and Ten in the Bed by Penny Dale (board book form).

As well as the standard reference rhymes and songs. A particularly cute one I pilfered from my coworker:

Where did you get that little red nose? (point to nose)

Jack Frost kissed it, I suppose (nod head)

He kissed it once. He kissed it twice.

Poor little nose! It’s as cold as ice!

So… we’ll see how this new season goes.

As a disclaimer: The Out in the Open initiative is incredibly successful in our branch for other programs like Tales for Tots (Ages 2-5) and Family Story Time (All ages). Markham, as a community is full of (and growing with) many new families who are generally newcomers to Canada. This initiative was created with the intention to promote library services to people who might not normally seek them out, such as newcomers. Yes, it has the best of intentions, but all early childhood literacy studies show that for infantliteracy, you basically need to keep them in lock-down so they can properly focus on going the 15 miles from Wibbleton to Wobbleton.

So, I compromised with Lois, she is doing a paid program in the room, as well as one section of Baby Goose, and I’m doing the other one. I’m learning fairly quickly, but a baby story time is a beast the kind of which is very different from a regular preschool story time, which I enjoy very much. 30 min. of rhymes and songs? The parents are the main audience? You depend on their participation for the babies to enjoy it? For realz? It’s tough.

I’m not completely un-prepared, Ontario Early Years, the early literacy program for which I’m a liaison is 0-5 years, with a fair amount of babies… and I have seen people do Baby Goose… but so far (2 programs in) I’ve come away with a sense of inadequacy and embarrassment. We’ll see what works and what changes! At least the babies seem to like me.

Here are some of the songs and rhymes I’ve been using:

The More We Get Together (You can make this song muccccchhhhh longer by adding verses like “the more we sing together/read together/share together” etc.)

Open Them, Shut Them (Extra verse: Creep them, creep them, creep them creep them/ Right up to your cheek/ Open up your little eyes and through your fingers peek)

We’ll see how the other sessions go…