9:00 a.m.: Mercifully short atrium meeting followed by the realization that there the only two people scheduled this morning, (as far as info staff goes), are Catherine and myself.

9:30 a.m.: Library opens   x . x <- the emoticon for f#@$ed.

10:06 a.m.: A group of waterlogged 2-3 year olds with 4 harried-looking camp counselors come in to the library and ask if they can have a room. All of our rooms are booked. They head for the children’s area. They are awfully cute.

10: 13 a.m.: A group of waterlogged 2-3 year olds with 4 harried-looking camp counselors come in to the library and ask if they can have a room. All of our rooms are booked. They head for the children’s area. They are awfully cute.

That was not a typo.

10:17 a.m.: A brief walk around the children’s department reveals that unbeknownst to me yet another group of older campers from the community centre has also snuck in, bored teen counselors in tow. They are hunkered down in the story nook playing with texture toys meant for babies. I see that the baskets that I bought to contain said toys yesterday are already broken. Note to self: Never go to the dollar store for things that need to stand up to a department full of kids.

10:30 a.m.: Thankfully our Musical Theatre camp instructor, Crystal, says that the teeny-tiny people can use the meeting room for their lunch 11:30. Otherwise they were going to eat in the children’s department, which would most likely have resulted in a good solid talking-to from maintenance.

11:30 a.m.: Crystal seems to have forgotten our agreement.

(It’s okay – she’s directing a cast of 20 children in a production of Mamma Mia! by herself. She’s allowed. )

11:32 a.m.: I reconcile the room situation and stall for time so the room can be cleaned up. To do this means a story time for 54 children. We read Wiggle, by Doreen Cronin (one of my all-time favourite large-group-zomg story time books)  and Let’s Go Visiting by Sue Williams (sequel to I Went Walking). The former is extensible from age 2 until 6 years at the outside. The latter two books are for younger children (I’d say 5 and under, depending on how you read them). I opened, as I usually do, with “Shake Your Sillies Out” and closed with “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” The sound of 54 small children shouting “HOORAY” is really quite something… In addition, because it was raining, I sang “Mr. Sun” and another song about rain. It’s a good one because it allows kids to make noise, even if they don’t want to sing along. Goes like this:

A Little Drop of Rain
(To the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”)
A little drop of rain hits the ground      (slap thigh or ground w/ one hand)
Then another drop of rain hits the ground      (slap thigh or ground w/ other hand)
Then another and another and another and another
(Slap ground w/ alternating hands as fast as you can in time with “anothers”)
And another drop of rain hits the ground!
SPLASH! (Slap ground with both hands)

11:40 a.m.: Kidlets into lunch. Whew.

11:50 a.m.: Realize that I’ve been scheduled for lunch at 1:00 and have story time at 1:30. Catherine will be alone for an hour if I go for lunch at 12:00. She says it’s okay. I don’t think she is serious.

11:53 p.m.: Go in the borrower’s services (that’s Markham-ese for “circ”) department’s workspace and see the veritable Fort Knox of courier boxes that have come in. I briefly wish for an iPhone and a twitpic account.

12:00 p.m.: Standard reference (haha) lunch.

1:00 p.m.: Start cleaning up for Baby Goose.

1:30 p.m.: My last Wednesday afternoon Baby Goose of the summer – and possibly ever. In the fall we’ll be doing Baby Goose in the mornings only, which is not the most convenient thing in the world. My little guys Ryan, Alex, and Vincent showed up to the story time! They’ve also been coming to the story time since they were about 3 months old. Now they’re all starting to crawl and sit up and babble. Awww  …

2:00 p.m.: I admit our discontinuation of afternoon Baby Goose to parents and get complaints, albeit understanding complaints. More evals this time – continuous comments about the space – I’ve been consistently getting numbers of over 60 for Wednesday afternoons. It’s a squeeze.

4:10 p.m.: More cute kids from Stonebridge P.S. recognize me from Summer Reading Club promotions. Vincent and Raymond (grade 3 and 4, respectively) kind of act like I’m a rockstar… and subsequently feed my ego and re-affirm my belief in the importance of what I do. Now if they could just stop in every day 50 min. before I leave and 5 seconds before I go off the deep end, I’ll be set! Maybe I could pay them in stickers…

5:20 p.m.: Run screaming from the building.

Make record time home (I <3 the 407.), begin blogging, and pick up husbandito from the train.

Here We Go Up, Up, Up!
To the tune of “Skip to my Lou-bee-lou”
Here we go up, up, up!
Here we go down, down, down
Here we go up, up, up!
And here we go down, down, down!

The Grand Old Duke of York
The grand old Duke of York
He had 10,000 men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again
And when they were up they were up!
And when they were down they were down
And when they were only half way up,
They were neither up nor down

Very easy to memorize and the babies really dig it. This is also a good visual example of how we present our “story time out in the open.” You can see both the pros and cons of such a practice. Pro: Everyone feels welcome to participate and numbers are great! Con: Everyone feels welcome to participate and numbers are great. These issues (popularity, inclusiveness, overcrowding and quality of story time) will warrant further discussion, but until then – enjoy the video! Many thanks to Renée’s cousin.

Baby Goose Story Time Video

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…

Family Story Time 1

Shake My Sillies Out

Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See? by Eric Carle

Little Bunny Foo-Foo

Bouncing Ball

I’m bouncing, bouncing everywhere

I bounce and bounce into the air!

I’m bouncing, bouncing like a ball

I bounce and bounce until I fall!

Oh My Gosh, Mrs. McNosh by Sarah Weeks

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

Life is but a dream!

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the river

If you see a polar bear

Don’t forget to shiver

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream

If you see a crocodile

Don’t forget to scream

Row, row, row your boat

Gently to the shore

If you see a lion

Don’t forget to roar

Row, row, row your boat

Gently to a stop

And if you see a bunny there

Don’t forget to hop!

Zoom, Zoom, Zoom

We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen

The More We Get Together

Do Your Ears Hang Low?

We’re Going to the Zoo words by Tom Paxton

If You’re Happy and You Know It

We’re going on a Bear Hunt was really popular… actually one mother actually asked to check it out after the story time! All in all, despite the thrown-together, last minute nature of it all, the kids loved it! (or appeared to) and the parents didn’t make any comments on the … “crappyness” of the craft. Lesson learned? Marian maybe is right. Maybe you don’t need to re-invent the wheel every time you do a program. I guess I’m still learning to stop trying to go above and beyond time and time again. And I don’t mean that in a bragging way… Summer Reading Club case in point, my bright ideas aren’t always the easiest way of doing things.

Maybe it’s the digital education doing it to me… I feel like I have to do these pioneering and great things in the department and in programming. In all seriousness, the children’s department doesn’t necessarily need to be on the bleeding edge of anything, as much as I would like it to be. The dire reality of the situation is that in order for something cutting edge to really work in a children’s department… well of course, it needs to be something that kids will like doing, but even more importantly, it needs to be something that the parents will understand and support. Oh well, for the time being I’ll live vicariously through my teen librarian coworkers and their forays into Facebook. I wonder if I could do Webkinz story time?

]]> http://garz4lib.net/2008/07/15/family-story-time-a-lesson-in-not-being-cool/feed/ 0 http://garz4lib.net/2008/07/08/family-fun-day-monday-week-1-funny-foods-i-can-haz-out-in-the-open/ http://garz4lib.net/2008/07/08/family-fun-day-monday-week-1-funny-foods-i-can-haz-out-in-the-open/#comments Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:26:06 +0000 mmgarza http://accidentalchildrenslibrarian.wordpress.com/?p=19 My very first story time that I have created… planned… and will do for longer than 15 minutes! Hooray! I was really really nervous. This is also Angus Glen’s very first “out in the open” story time ever.

Good thing it went much better than expected!

The kids were incredibly cute. I’ve found that small children like stickers and clapping their hands and jumping around more than … oh, I don’t know… Donald Trump likes money? That much. Kids would maybe even eat bugs for a sticker. And if anything involves clapping and jumping around it’s an instant hit. So “Shake Your Sillies Out” = instant success! Altogether this was a much more positive experience, despite my nerves, than previous story times. Hurray!

Funny Foods

The Beastly Feast by Bruce Goldstone

Shake My Sillies Out

Apples and Bananas

I like to eat, eat, eat apples and bananas
I like to eat, eat, eat apples and bananas

I like to ate, ate, ate ay-ples and ba-nay-nays
I like to ate, ate, ate ay-ples and ba-nay-nays

I like to eat, eat, eat ee-ples and bee-nee-nees
I like to eat, eat, eat ee-ples and bee-nee-nees

I like to ite, ite, ite i-ples and bi-ni-nis

I like to ite, ite, ite i-ples and bi-ni-nis

I like to ote, ote, ote oh-ples and bo-no-nos
I like to ote, ote, ote oh-ples and bo-no-nos

I like to ute, ute, ute, ooh-ples and bu-nu-nus

I like to ute, ute, ute, ooh-ples and bu-nu-nus

Mmm, Cookies! By Robert Munsch

Betty Botter bought some butter,
But, she said, the butter’s bitter;
If I put it in my batter
It will make my batter bitter,
But a bit of better butter
Will make my batter better.
So she bought a bit of butter
Better than her bitter butter,
And she put it in her batter
And the batter was not bitter.
So ’twas better Betty Botter bought a bit of better butter.

If You’re Happy and You Know It

Who Took the Cookies from the Cookie Jar? By Philemon Sturges

5 Little Cookies

5 little cookies sitting on a tray

5 little cookies smiling all day

Along came a little child rubbin’ her tummy

One cookie disappeared, yum, yum, yummy! (Repeat 4.3.2.1)

Do Your Ears Hang Low?

Bee- Bim Bop by Linda Sue Park

I guess when librarians plan programming consistently, we don’t realize how much we also program customers. I had maybe 2 families here for the actual story time itself… the rest were just people I wrangled and co-opted to come to the story time, and those who just happened to stop over. After the program ended and during the craft portion of the program itself I got all sorts of questions like “you really have a story time Monday nights? Every Monday? Really?” I was told later it was because Mondays at AG have traditional NOT been story time nights. So have we confused them or “delighted” them? Who knows? At least the kids seem to enjoy it. Too bad it all ends in the fall. We’ll see what happens to the customers then! Mwahahaha…