Got Outreach?

I walk in to _______ preschool.  Shouts of “Storytime!” and “It’s the book lady!” abound.  Teachers greet me with happy (and relieved) smiles.  Children (mostly) quickly gather on the rug as I pull books and CDs out of our Deerfield Public Library tote bag.  Another outreach storytime begins.

“How can you keep doing preschool outreach?”

How can we not?  In this day and age of limited library resources, we have found that our Preschool Outreach services are a wonderful return on our investment!*  (*not just financial)

“What do you do?”

We visit area preschools to lead storytimes.  A theme-based approach organizes our outreach.  For this school year, some of our themes are:  Vrroom! (transportation), Tippy-Toes (movement/dance), Hot Cocoa and Cold Snow (opposites or winter), and Guess Who? (imagination).  As Preschool Outreach Coordinator, I select the themes and pull a stack of books that will work for the various ages, but each individual librarian creates her own storytimes for the classes that she’ll visit.  As a team, we love bouncing ideas off of each other (and, yes, “borrowing” ideas too) but we also love being able to use the books that best suit our own styles!

 “How do you arrange the schedule?”

It is definitely a challenge to schedule the visits, especially during those times when we are in the midst of our own in-house storytime sessions!  In mid-August, I send out emails to the preschool directors and include a list of our themes for each month as well as the menu of in-service topics I can offer to their staffs.  Storytimes are scheduled on a first-come, first-served basis, and we end up visiting between 1 and 6 classes a week, which translates to between 1 and 3 schools per week.

“What have you learned along the way?”

We learned to put restrictions on both how many classrooms we would visit in a trip (no more than two) and how many children could be in a storytime (no more than 20).  In addition, after a challenging first two years of doing individual themes for each school, we started selecting our own themes.  For the most part, the preschool directors were fine with this.

“What’s a typical storytime?”

While we might each use different titles within the chosen theme, our approaches are basically the same:  great books, fingerplays and songs to share with our preschool friends!  Each preschooler goes home that day with a Storytime Sheet which has the titles of the books and songs we’ve featured, as well as the words to the fingerplays.  The back of the Storytime Sheet always features a coloring page which ties in to the theme.  We have found these handouts to be a great reminder to parents and caregivers that the Library is not only a partner with the preschools in their children’s early education, but a vital early learning resource itself.   Parents also then have a record of what books their children have heard that day, in case they want to visit the Library and check them out on their own.  That’s truly the best return on our investment: *when the preschooler walks in to the Youth Services Department and recognizes the librarian behind the desk!  It’s a “rock-star sighting” as a shy smile creeps across the face of the child, and we lean over to ask, “Did I read at your school?”  The smile gets bigger at that moment….on both of our faces!

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Our guest blogger today is Kary Henry. Kary is thrilled to be a Youth Services Associate and Preschool Outreach Coordinator at the Deerfield Public Library.  She loves leading the 4-5 year old early literacy storytimes!  She can be reached at khenry@deerfieldlibrary.org and @MissKaryReads on Twitter.  

Please note that as a guest post, the views expressed here do not represent the official position of ALA or ALSC.

If you’d like to write a guest post for the ALSC Blog, please contact Mary Voors, ALSC Blog manager, at alscblog@gmail.com.