Looking for suggestions to plan and implement a weekday library event in our church library for preschoolers such as a story hour. Would love to hear ideas that have worked well for others. How often do you conduct your activity? Should it be weekly for a few weeks at a time or year round? How long should each session last and do morning sessions work best for this age group? Do you enlist guest story tellers or readers? How do you determine your story topics or selections? Do you pick a topic and read several books on that topic as time allows or limit it to one book? What other activities are planned? Do you have related crafts, songs, finger plays or snacks? Do you advertise this activity for the community and how do you advertise? Do you preregister for each series of sessions? Have you tried coordinating your story hour at the same time as a book/Bible study time for moms? I look forward to any input. Thanks!
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Our church has a preschool program with classes for children 3 years old, 4 years old, and 5 years old. The 5-year-old children are Kindergarten age and will go to 1st grade next year.
We chose to have a time for the Kindergarten group to come to the library for a reading time. A library book is read to them and then they have the opportunity to check out a book for one week. If the book is not returned, they must wait until it is returned to check out a book.
This year we have two groups; they all come on Thursday morning by class group, and stay about 30 minutes, sometimes a little longer. We have three ladies who read; one main reader and two alternates. The main reader has a suggested list of books chosen to read each week, but sometimes we do change from the list. But having the list lets us know what has been read and what is scheduled for later.
Since our purpose is to introduce the children to the library and to encourage them to read, we use the time to read a book, and as 2 or 3 children are choosing books with their teacher's help, the reader is engaging the others to talk about things in the book or searching the pictures, etc.
We are just changing our library software to Atriuum by Book Systems, and our city school system uses the same software. Later in the year, I may introduce the children to the catalog and show them how to find a book that they want to read. And, since our library database will be available online, we can share the website with parents as well.
We hope that the reading time and other contacts will help the children to enjoy reading and to continue to interact with the church and the library.
We are thinking about doing this, as well, but I'm not sure how soon we'll be able to get it going. In the meantime, we do a story time during the SS hour on Sunday mornings. Kindergarten comes on the 1st Sunday of the month, 2yos on the 2nd, 3yos on the 3rd and 4yos on the 4th. We are thinking about looking into expanding to add Grades 1-3 whenever there is a fifth Sunday of the month. For the 2-5yos, we have a different reader each week - women in our church who like to do it (one is not on the library committee; the others are). Each reader chooses what she wants to read, usually just two books because it is, after all, the SS hour! It has worked really well; the teachers seem to like it, and the kids are now used to it (for the most part) and enjoy coming, too.
As far as a mid-week event, I'll be curious to hear what others have done, too. I've been thinking that if I were doing it, I'd probably try to have a theme each week, even if that theme is "my own personal favorites"!! I really like the idea of coordinating it with an already-happening Bible Study or young moms' program (like MOPS)- the kids whose moms are in the study could take part and I bet the regular child care workers would like it, too.