week 7: burn down the library! redux

Head Start storytime returns to the library! Hooray! Well, hooray for all the good reasons that storytime happens in the library and maybe not-quite-as-hooray for all the mischief we find ourselves getting up to in new environments. Still, on the whole way more good than bad.

So. The library! Very exciting. For some reason only three of the four classes made the journey down the hall, but in the end that was plenty. Not that I didn't miss the kids who weren't there, it's just that we don't often have all the classes together for a single storytime so it's a pretty healthy-sized group in any event. That is one of the exciting things about doing what we do at the library.

I also added to the, uh, excitement by forgetting my bag of storytime tricks at work. Things are definitely getting more complicated with doing storytimes all over town: Exhibit A. So this storytime had no Bianca the Bunny, and no little red birds (well, the puppets anyway) either. Rats! I did bring my shakers though, because I have my own shakers at work. But here's what I did. I asked everyone if they ever been sick and missed a day of school. Pretty much everyone had (natch), and I told them that Bianca had a cold (just like them!) and couldn't come to storytime. Everyone was very forgiving.

We started with Boy + Bot, which was kind of a last-minute substitution. I had wanted to read it for a while now, saw it on display in Ms. Amy's library, and boom! there you go. It went fine, I think. Everyone seemed to really enjoy it. I cut Two Little Redbirds/Dos Pajaritos because I forgot my puppets, but we made up for it with a really good version of Icky-Sticky Bubblegum. I think we got bubblegum stuck in our bellybuttons, in our ears, in our hair, on our elbows, up our noses, and finally (of course) on our eyebrows. I totally pulled my eyebrow off - can you believe it?! So much fun!

I've read Dinosaur vs. Bedtime at this Head Start before (last spring) so I thought I knew what to expect. I did not. They went bananas for it. Like, GABM-style bananas. Super-fun, but at a point (I suspect) there is a slight element of going bananas for the sake of going bananas; which is fine, storytime is supposed to be fun. I was able to reign things in for Johnny Works With One Hammer and Baby Shark, and Thank You, Bear helped calm things down nicely. I love it, and it is a great "calm down" story for rowdy preschoolers.

Since I had forgotten my puppets, I thought for sure we should use the shakers. At this point, though, we were up against the clock a bit. Still, one shaker song. I've been doing Milkshake as a shaker song really successfully at other storytimes, so I thought, why not? Turns out shakers might have been a bit too much stimulus in the (relatively) new library environment, especially with a group that large. No big deal, we just had a couple few little ones who might have been ready to wrap up and head to recess. It was getting late in the afternoon, for pete's sake! All in all, a grand success.