Picture this: a room filled with children silently reading in comfy chairs, gentle music playing softly in the background, lights dimmed, and a magical sense of peace floating in the air… Does this seem too good to be true? I’m here to tell you that it can be done! The Silent Book Club phenomenon has taken the art of reading independently into a social event. It’s an excursion for readers to share a connected space of imagination as they read their own book while physically being in a group setting. These events have predominantly taken off in adult circles, but they have started to trickle down into teen and children’s spaces as well.
Tag: children’s programming
Accessible Story Times in 3 Easy Steps
Since joining ALA in 2022, I have fully immersed myself in the world of programming for children with disabilities, from attending ALA Annual sessions to completing virtual toolkits about this topic. However, it is not as easy to find resources and connections as you may think. To aid other public librarians who may be interested in this topic, I compiled a list of three tips to make story time programming just a bit more inclusive! It is my hope that with simple actionable steps, library staff will be able to include all kiddos in their programs without needing to completely revamp their programming models. While the tips listed below are specifically for story time aged kiddos, they can also be applied to a variety of programs and across age ranges.
Keep It Simple
Children’s librarians are some of the most creative people I have ever met. Some of the programs and storytime crafts I have seen over the years have really been impressive. But, all these great ideas take time to flesh out and put into a program. And sometimes, many times, we just don’t have the time. That’s where the old phrase “keep it simple” came into play for me this past summer. During the school year, we peppered our program schedule with what we viewed as “anyone can run” programs. Bingo days, play dough drop-ins, and Game Club, to name a few. These programs garnered some big attendance numbers. For a one-hour play dough drop-in, we had 51 people attend and they stayed the entire time! As we began planning for summer programs, I realized my programmers were a bit burned out and the new ideas were just not flowing. That’s…
Music and Story time Programs
How do you incorporate music into your story time programs? Has this gotten more difficult as more music has gone in the direction of streaming? This was a recent and interesting discussion on ALA Connect. In the past, we used CDs, but some of us moved on to streaming. This may be great for listening – but problematic for story time programs. What works best—Spotify? YouTube? Apple Music? Amazon? Dropbox? CDs? To pay or not to pay? We polled ALSC’s Childrens and Technology committee members to see how each of our systems tackle this issue. The solutions are varied and work for those of us who use them, but they may not work for all. With CDs, availability is the issue as they are neither being produced nor purchased as much. If you still have CDs, one option is to download them either to Dropbox or to a network drive….