How can we not?\u00a0 In this day and age of limited library resources, we have found that our Preschool Outreach services are a wonderful return on our<\/span> investment!*\u00a0 (*not just financial)<\/p>\n \u201cWhat do you do?\u201d\u009d<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n We visit area preschools to lead storytimes.\u00a0 A theme-based approach organizes our outreach.\u00a0 For this school year, some of our themes are:\u00a0 Vrroom! (transportation), Tippy-Toes (movement\/dance), Hot Cocoa and Cold Snow (opposites or winter), and Guess Who? (imagination).\u00a0 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\u2019ll visit.\u00a0 As a team, we love bouncing ideas off of each other (and, yes, \u201cborrowing\u201d\u009d ideas too) but we also love being able to use the books that best suit our own styles!<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cHow do you arrange the schedule?\u201d\u009d<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n 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!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat have you learned along the way?\u201d\u009d<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n 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).\u00a0 In addition, after a challenging first two years of doing individual themes for each school, we started selecting our own themes.\u00a0 For the most part, the preschool directors were fine with this.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s a typical storytime?\u201d\u009d<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n While we might each use different titles within the chosen theme, our approaches are basically the same:\u00a0 great books, fingerplays and songs to share with our preschool friends!\u00a0 Each preschooler goes home that day with a Storytime Sheet which has the titles of the books and songs we\u2019ve featured, as well as the words to the fingerplays.\u00a0 The back of the Storytime Sheet always features a coloring page which ties in to the theme.\u00a0 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\u2019s early education, but a vital early learning resource itself.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That\u2019s truly the best return on our investment: *when the preschooler walks in to the Youth Services Department and recognizes the librarian behind the desk!\u00a0 It\u2019s a \u201crock-star sighting\u201d\u009d as a shy smile creeps across the face of the child, and we lean over to ask, \u201cDid I read at your school?\u201d\u009d\u00a0 The smile gets bigger at that moment\u2026.on both of our faces!<\/p>\n ***************************************<\/i><\/p>\n Please note that as a guest post, the views expressed here do not represent the official position of ALA or ALSC.<\/i><\/p>\n![\"Personal](\"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/headshot-4.jpg\")
<\/a>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.\u00a0 She loves leading the 4-5 year old early literacy storytimes!\u00a0 She can be reached at khenry@deerfieldlibrary.org<\/a> and @MissKaryReads on Twitter.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n