Librarian Ginny

Preschool Cooks & Books: Dumplings!

This was our 5th session and my favorite we’ve done so far! I’m not gonna lie, I stressed about this one a lot – double guessed if the preschoolers would be able to do everything we asked them to do with the recipe, wondered if we could get the cabbage into small enough pieces, if they’d have the dexterity to fold the dumplings, and so much more. Everything turned out great! I feel more and more that when it comes to cooking, preschoolers are capable of so much more than we give them credit for.

So let’s dive in!

Preschool Cooks & Books: Pizza!

This was our 4th session of Preschool Cooks & Books! We’ve gotten more and more comfortable with doing these preschool cooking programs and have been having a lot of fun with them!

Preschool Cooks & Books: Cookies

After an ambitious session last time with Stone Soup, we wanted to do a slightly simpler one. We’re hoping to alternate between simple recipes and more difficult ones as well as rotating between foods that many kids might know and love and ones that may be new to them. So this session definitely fell into the familiar and easy recipes. For this session, we made Sugar Cookies and icing to go on top!

Preschool Cooks & Books: Stone Soup!

This was our 2nd session of this series of cooking programs targeted at the Preschool level. This was kind of an ambitious recipe to do on just our second run, but I think it went well with all the extra planning we did plus the alterations we put in place. Let’s dive into what we did!

Description: Read about your food and eat it, too! We’ll read a book, sing some songs, and make a delicious new recipe each month! Ages 3-6.

Details: This is a 1.5hr program for kids 3-6 years old with their caregiver. We set out to have two main portions of the program. 1) the cooking/instructions/hands-on component. 2) a short storytime to reinforce the foods and concepts we did during cooking, which also allows us to finish up cooking or baking as they’re getting wiggles out during the storytime.

Budget: The budget for each session is up to $100, a bit higher than I’d do for one session, but the cost of food was the main portion. We usually only end up spending about $60.

Black Experiences (For Black History Month)

It’s February! Black History Month! I planned this storytime with the intent of giving a nod to Black history, but also wanted to look to Black joy and futures. So I did a little of both and called my theme “Black Experiences.” I looked to the book below, Let’s Talk About Race in Storytimes by Jessica Anne Bratt to get inspiration and good verbage for some of my transitions in this storytime. It’s a fantastic book with really practical ways to talk to kids about race in a developmentally appropriate manner. I highly recommend it!

And without further ado, here’s the full storytime script below:

Storytime: Cookies!

I love doing storytimes on baked goods/cooking because they mimic things that kids sometimes do in their real life. This means that the kids are slightly prepped for what we do in storytime and it can give them a great sense of agency. Which means you can have a lot of fun with it! Another thing I love about this kind of storytime is that baking and cooking are all about sequencing — just like sotries! It’s a fun way to talk about sequencing in a way that they can play with.

In this one, I focused on Gingerbread specifically since I did it in Winter, but there are so many great substitute books and rhymes that you can sub in for the ones I chose and could do it any time of year.

Here’s the full storytime script below:

Cupcake Wars: Winter Edition!

This was our second time doing Cupcake Wars for our tween patrons (ages 9-12). We made some big changes from the first session. If you want to see what we did there, follow this link to the write up! Other wise, stay tuned to see how we changed things and how it went.

Storytime: Shadows

With Groundhog’s Day coming up, I wanted to share a storytime focused all around Shadows and groundhogs! This is a super fun topic for kids to learn about and also includes some STEAM concepts. I’m planning on doing this storytime just after Groundhog’s Day, so some of the script won’t be finished until after Punxsutawney Phil makes his prediction!

Here’s the full storytime script below:

Storytime: Coziness!

The midwest got a pretty big snow storm just recently and we’re getting more tomorrow! So I’m planning a storytime all about coziness and comforting things to share with our preschoolers. This storytime includes some of my favorite books and activities to do in storytime, so it’s bound to be fun!

Here’s the full storytime script below:

Tween STEAM Club

My coworker, C, is an absolute treasure when it comes to STEAM! She’s super excited and interested in the topic and that excitement helps get the kids in the program just as excited. C wanted to begin offering a regular STEAM program for the tween audience and I thought it was a great idea. We decided to do it bimonthly and to see where it goes from there! As C’s mentor librarian I get to be in on the fun, help brainstorm pieces of the program, and co-run it. But really? C is so intuitive, experienced (in a school setting), and passionate about this topic that I honestly didn’t need to do too much in terms of directing or brainstorming. Here’s what C did for this first session: