Librarian Ginny

Storytime: Homes and Houses!

Homes and Houses is a great theme for around the holidays when people are often traveling to relatives. It brings great opportunities to talk about, and fight the stigma around, people who don’t have homes or have different homes.

Storytime: Rain and Rainbows!

It’s been raining a lot here, lately, so I decided to include that as part of my theme for my virtual storytime. For this storytime, I went heavy on the rain portion of the storytime because I adore a good rain storm! However, you can add in more rainbows easily! There are SO MANY great songs, rhymes, and books about this topic. What are some of your favorites?

MLK Day At The Library

My coworker, K, and I were put in charge of this past Martin Luther King Jr. Day for the children’s department at our library. It was my first time being in charge of this program and K and I agreed we wanted to approach it with joy, celebration, and truth. Neither K or I are black, but we’ve both been watching current events unfold and wanted to create a space for learning and relating to each other. So here’s what we did…

ECRR: Reading and Writing!

Our final post on the ECRR daily practices is Reading and Writing! Because reading and writing are tied together more tightly than any of the other five daily practices, I’m going to talk about them together. Reading and writing go together. They draw upon the same shared knowledge bases and to learn one, you have to have a foundation of the other. They both build phonological awareness, narrative skills, alphabetics, and print concepts. Even more, they work with the symbolical nature of language.

If you missed the first three daily practices, you can find them here!

Storytime: Weather!

There are a lot of components to weather, especially if you live in the Midwest like I do! Seriously, we have snow, 70 degree sun, and a tornado warning all on the same day here. That’s what makes weather a fantastic themes, though! You can talk about seasons, rain, snow, ice, wind, clouds, sun, storms, etc. So here’s a sampling of some fun weather stories and activities!

Look for future storytime posts about individual seasons, rain, snow, sun, etc!

ECRR: Playing!

Here’s another one of my favorite ECRR practices! Playing! It helps children think symbolically. A ruler becomes a magic wand. Our surroundings become prehistoric times with dinosaurs and a playmate becomes a t-rex! Their imagination is the limit! Just the act of this kind of play reinforces the code deciphering children will do later on when they’re learning to read and write.

Storytime: Soup!

Whether you’re using it as part of a sickness/illness theme or just on its own, Soup makes for a fun storytime! I have a few absolute favorites among this script, hopefully they’ll become some of your favorites, too!

Graham Cracker Houses

Around November and December of each year, I start getting excited about the holiday season. There’s something about the crisp air, lights and vivid greens against the otherwise gray world, and the anticipated time with family. I love the feeling. But I know not everyone celebrates the same way I do, so I try to have secular options to celebrate the season. One of the options we did this year, was a building challenge with graham crackers!

ECRR: Singing!

The second in our series on Every Child Ready to Read’s five daily practices is here! If you missed last week’s edition of Talking, find it here! This week’s practice is Singing. This is one of my absolute favorite ways to promote early literacy. Singing comes so natural to kids and it helps them learn in a very fun and playful way! Let’s dive in!

Storytime: Dragons!

Dragons are one of my very favorite themes to do in storytime! The kids love the imagination play that dragons bring and love roaring and acting like dragons even more! Because of this, it can be kind of a raucous storytime, but if you lean into it, it’s so much fun!