We recently travelled with Chouchou to Raleigh, NC – he had work, and we found play. One thing that Mon Cœur (MC) loves is story time. Living in the country, we have one library and one day when story time is offered. So, we were delighted with the many days of story time offerings in Raleigh.
MC loves the lapsits and songs that we’ve learned at our local library, and I learned a few new tricks from the librarians in Raleigh. I find myself often returning home from story time to “research” the songs we heard so I can practice and sing with MC. I keep these songs in my back pocket – they are always great to either soothe, redirect or just interact and have fun with MC. Below are some “steals” from one of our Raleigh story time visits.
Mr. Keith @ Cary Community Library was phenomenal. He was high energy, kept a fast pace, and I love how he took the theme of transportation and built a whole story time with it using different books, songs, and rhymes with gestures. The 25 minutes breezed by.
He opened up story time by singing ABCs with “Oreo” dog puppet – MC loved singing the alphabet even though she misses most of the letters she’s getting the rhythm of the song. She loved even more that afterwards we all barked for Oreo.
Next, there were different types of vehicles hidden behind planets. For each vehicle, there was a different noise and color. Mr. Keith would uncover the vehicles and he would introduce a sound for each vehicle (car horn, wipers, muffler, etc). These same vehicles and sounds reappeared during a book walk of Toot Toot, Beep Beep! by Emma Garcia. We used the same noises from the book along with gestures to sing Driving in my Car by Ralph Covert, which is MCs favorite new song. I never would have found this song, but it’s catchy and fun and MC loves to go, “Red light! Stop!”
Mr. Keith kept the high energy rolling with a train rhyme and book – I Love Trains, singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” at slow, normal, and fast paces, and then a rhyme with the felt board about astronaut suits. I wouldn’t have thought to take a song and sing it at different speeds – it made it fun and new even though it was being repeated.
We ended story time with MC’s favorite, Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, We’re Going to the Moon song. At our library, it was more of a lapsit, but Mr. Keith has kids “Get into their rockets” squat into launch mode, use their arms to make the rocket and then blast off. MC really got into it.
This story time reminded me of many simple ways to add fun to our every day…such as using puppets for some quirky fun to make MC laugh (or enlist her help), using different speeds for a change of pace with a favorite song, and doing a book walk instead of reading through a book every time.
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