Outreach Storytime, Books on Books

Spring has not yet sprung in the lovely Midwest yet, and the heat at the preschool was leaking and had to be shut off this morning, so I attempted to do my outreach storytime in the gym. Large, open spaces are very distracting to classes of preschoolers, and taking them out of their daily school routine causes chaos. I don't want to say that my storytime today was a complete failure, but it was pretty close.

The first 5 minutes of my planned storytime was spent wrangling the kids to come and have a seat. Then we read:


This story has beautiful illustrations, and is a little longer  than some of my stories for this age group, but the rhyming and pacing is fluid and fast, making the story fly by at a rapid pace. The kids would normally be entranced by the illustrations of this book, but not today.

I handed out magnetic letters and sang the ABC song. When we got to their  letter they had to stand up and shout their letter along with the song. Magnets, however, like gyms, are easily distracting to children in general. We almost made it through the entire alphabet before letters started flying across the floor and had to be put away quite quickly. (I was planning on having them put themselves into alphabetical order, but that just wasn't going to happen today).

Then we read one of my favorite stories:

The kids couldn't get enough, The thought it was hilarious. I  had several kids ask me to read it again even before I was finished!

We usually do another rhyme and short book, but I spent so much time getting everyone seated and sitting that we ran out of time. I did my goodbye song and left, disappointed. Hopefully the heat will return and my visit in two weeks will go better than planned.