Here at APL, we try to make sure that we have programming for everyone, and that includes the library's youngest patrons! We offer at least one storytime program 6 days a week, every week, which means my coworkers and I have read through MANY different storytime books, and we all have some classics and favourites that we like to use again and again. I'm going to take some time today to go over a few of my favourite storytime books, and talk about why I think they're a good fit, and hopefully explain a little bit of APL's "storytime philosophy" along the way!
Library Storytime vs At-Home Storytime
Without presuming too much, library storytime's typically look a little different from the storytime's that you may have at home with your own kids in a few key ways that can impact the kinds of stories we read:
For starters, we have a lot of different families that like to come take part in our storytime! As library staff, it's really nice to see kids interacting with each other during storytime (even if it distracts them from what we're reading!), and seeing parents connect with each other makes storytime a pretty social affair for everyone.
We also do a lot of singing and dancing around! Songs, finger-plays, movements, and dances help kids memorize and repeat things. "The Ants go Marching", for example, is a classic song not only because it helps kids learning to count from 1 to 10, it also incorporates rhymes of the numbers and actions that relate to them to better help them memorize the sequence!
You may also realize that we repeat songs and dances for similar reasons. I always start and end my storytimes with the same hello/goodbye song, plus the crowd-pleasing song "Zoom, Zoom, Zoom", and a song in the middle that gets the kids on their feet in case they start getting antsy. They become familiar to the audience, which helps the kids with their memorization and their understanding skills, too!
But with all of that out of the way, here's some of my favourite books that touch on a lot of these points - making them great for storytime!
Ten on the Sled by Kim Norman
"Ten on the Sled" is a fun little book that might feel familiar to adults that read it - it's based on the nursery rhyme "10 in the Bed"! Norman makes the simple rhyme little more complex by filling the book with ten different animals, and adding alliterative rhymes and funny word play as each of the different animals fall out of the sled while it moves. What really makes this book special is that, if you're familiar with the original rhyme, this becomes a book that you can sing, adding a recognizable pattern to a story about counting!
Some other books that do similar things that we like include Jane Cabrera's "If You're Happy and you Know It", "Sharon, Lois and Bram's Skinnamarink", and Kin Eagle's "It's Raining, It's Pouring".
Duck, Duck, Moose! by Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen
"Duck, Duck, Moose!" has such a fun, infectious energy to it, and it's helped whenever parent's read along. This book has only two words in it - Duck and Moose - but it plays with anticipation in a way that will get any kid giggling! Just like a game of Duck, Duck, Goose, you never know if that darned moose is going to show up to cause a mess whenever you turn the page. It even manages to tell a story about accidents and feelings in the end - all with two words!
Elisha Cooper does something really similar with her book "Yes & No". Most of the book is only the words Yes and No, but reading it as excited as the dog is to play outside, and how disappointed it is to go to bed, makes it even funner for the kids!
Whoops! by Suzi Moore
"Whoops!" is a fun, rhyming book about a cat, dog and mouse going to a witch for help because they can't meow, bark or squeak, respectively. This book is really good because the rhymes and wordplay get bigger and sillier as the witch keeps trying new spells without success, all while making our three animals cry out with noises from completely different animals! I like to ask the kids what animals actually make those sounds, or I like to sing a few rounds of Old Macdonald after the book is finished so that we can attach the right animal to the right noises in the end!
"Bark, George" by Jules Feiffer plays with animal noises belonging to the wrong animal similarly.
This is the Boat that Ben Built by Jen Lynn Bailey
"The Boat that Ben Built" is all about alliteration and repetition. As each page adds a new animal that interacts with the environment around it, it counts back, repeating each of the lines that came before it. By the end of one read-through, kids may catch on to the rhythm and be following along even if they haven't grasped the words quite yet. The meter is simple, but it means that Bailey can add more and more to it without over-complicating it.
Allan Wolf's "The Blanket Where Violet Sits" and Michelle Robinson's "And the Robot Went..." are similar "cumulative" stories with repetitive, building rhymes.
This is Not my Hat by Jon Klassen
This book is great for egging on kids with question after question! Each page has only one or two simple sentences on it, but it's full on fun for kids because of how the words play with the pictures. While the little fish is confident that the fish they stole the hat from wont wake up any time soon, the picture shows the big fish, eyes wide awake. It's fun to ask them what the pictures mean instead of telling them - it helps them figure out how to read the whole story!
Klassen has actually written a few books of animals getting into hat related antics, like "I Want my Hat Back" and "We Found a Hat"!
And there you have it! Everything you need to know about how APL does storytime, plus some books to help inspire your own storytime! Let us know about some of the books that you like to read - who knows, maybe we'll try them out for ourselves next time!
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