Our children's librarian quit and I covered the program for about a month while we hired someone new. The funniest part to me is interacting with the kids after we've finished the readalouds, rhymes, etc. because we have them do a little 'craft.' Most of our attendees are really too little for crafts, but the adults like the idea, and practicing holding crayons, glue sticks, etc. is still good for developing motor skills, so we do them anyway. I get overwhelmed by trying to pick activities when it's wide open, so I try to do a craft that's related to one of the books we read the same week.
We read The Very Hungry Caterpillar so the craft that week was gluing a series of green ovals (with a red one for the head) onto a piece of paper to make a caterpillar, then decorating with crayons. I tried to win over one little girl by telling her "nice caterpillar," and she gave me the most frustrated sigh and said "it's a spider." Oh, sorry!
The day after Halloween we read a book called Hello My Name is Tiger that features a kid who goes to school dressed in a tiger costume, and 'corrects' his name tag to say 'tiger' instead of his name, so I gave the kids each a piece of paper with a blank name tag and told them to draw themselves as their favorite animal and then have their grown-up fill in the name tag with the name of the animal. All but three kids just ignored the paper or scribbled unidentifiably on it. Of the other three, one drew a giraffe and two drew themselves as monsters, and happily told me that 'monster' was their favorite animal.
The biggest failure was when we read books about colors, so I gave each kid a color wheel and a bunch of stuff they could glue to it--pieces of pipe cleaners, feathers, sequins, etc. Not only did the kids totally fail to grasp the idea of gluing red things to the red section, green things to the green section, etc., but it was choking hazard city. I'm just glad I didn't have to perform the Heimlich Maneuver during that one.
our childrens librarian loves gluesticks and we have to keep an eye out for kids escaping from the storytime room armed with open gluesticks
ReplyDeleteIn her defense, pretty much everything else you could give a toddler is even worse.
DeleteI did storytime for 10 years. I loved it so much. But I despised coming up with crafts. I was terrible at it, and certain moms loved to remind me that they would do a better job if they had my position. Meh. I still loved storytime.
ReplyDeleteYou would think people who HAVE children would understand how hard it is to work with children! I know we all get 'How can I volunteer to work here?,' 'Your job must be so easy!' etc., but it's especially baffling to me when parents think they could do your job with no training.
DeleteI've given up trying to guess what kid's pictures are, even my own kids And I swear to god sometimes they tell me and my partner different things about the same picture
ReplyDelete