• Activities

    Story Time Theme – Fruit

    Last week’s story time was fun and healthy!  We learned all about fruit!  From the jungle all the way to the supermarket and the kids really liked the stories.  The first two were a little long – they might be better for a preschool story time rather than the toddler…

  • Lifestyle

    Family Place Library Training = Exhausted

    So I spent a number of hours today in training to re-create our library into a Family Place Library and as of right now, I am so tired I can barely see straight.  But, I got some amazing ideas, brainstormed with some amazing librarians, and met a lot of cool…

  • Lifestyle

    Family Place Library Training

    I’m away from my library for most of this week at a 4-day training so that our library can become a Family Place Library which means more offering more services to our families and young children.  I’m so excited to learn more about early childhood development and how our library…

  • Activities

    Story Time Theme – Spots and Stripes

    This week’s story time theme was so fun!  We had a great time with spots and stripes, we began with an oldie, but goodie – Harry the Dirty Dog by, Gene Zion.  This is a perfect story to talk about spots because Harry changes from a white dog with black…

  • Activities

    Story Time Theme – Orange

    This week’s story time theme is the color and the fruit – ORANGE!  I have found that color themes are really easy to do because you can find a bunch of stories that incorporate a certain color.  This fall I choses orange for the obivous reason that it works really…

  • Activities

    Story Time Theme – Teddy Bears

    I am currently providing three different story times for my library – the first is what I call a toddler traditional story time for 2 – 3 1/2 year olds where we read stories, have fingerplays and dance to music, the second is a parachute story time for the same age…

  • Reviews

    Down By the Station

    Down By the Station written by Jennifer Riggs Vetter and illustrated by Frank Remkiewicz is one of my favorite “transportation” themed stories for young children.  It works really well in story time because you can actually sing the whole story which keeps the kids interested, but it would work just as well as a…

  • Reviews

    Tough Chicks

    As I was searching the stacks for those perfect read-aloud books for story time, I came across Tough Chicks written by Cece Meng and illustrated by Melissa Suber and I fell in love!  Tough Chicks is the story of three little chicks by the names of Penny, Polly, adn Molly…

  • Activities

    Creepy Crawly Bug Story Time

    We had a small but enthusiastic crowd at toddler story time this morning.  Our theme – creepy-crawly bugs!  A couple of the girls started out with an, “ewwwww…. I don’t like bugs!”  But, I think the books that I picked worked out really well and everyone had a great time! Today…

  • Activities

    Whoooo’s at Storytime?

    This week’s toddler storytime theme was owls!  We learned the sign language word for owl (the same motion is used for binoculars as well!) and we read three owl-themed stories.  The first story was called Cock-A-Doodle-HOOOOOO! by Mick Manning about an owl who walks into a henhouse on a rainy…