Early Literacy Storytime Check-In

One of the most successful programs at my library this summer is Ready, Set, Read! our early literacy storytime for 4-6 year olds.  We started this program last summer (and have continued it once a month during the school year…with very small attendance, but still!  We kept at it!)  and had such success we brought it back again this summer.  The good news is the audience this year is EVEN LARGER and we’ve had some truly amazing and engaged crowds.  We offer this storytime once a week and we have never had a crowd of less than 25 kids.  This is a storytime that gets parents engaged, keeps older kids (we have 7-9 year old siblings coming and participating too because it’s so fun!)

I wrote all about why we decided to launch Ready, Set, Read! and what a program is like last summer. But I thought now was a good time to do an update on how it’s going, especially since it’s almost doubled in size since last year.

The set-up remains the same: sing songs, do fingerplays, do some dancing, read books, play games and do letter activities.  It’s just a really fun storytime to present and, I think, for the kids to participate in.  I think that’s a big part of the appeal – they are learning and they are building their early literacy but we’re also just having fun!

I’ve gotten so many of these great ideas from fellow librarians and bloggers (check out my blog roll for some of my favorites!) and I want to thank everyone who shares their ideas – please keep it up!  I also get tons of ideas from browsing homeschool blogs and Pinboards. I keep lots of them organized on my own Early Literacy Pinboard, where you’ll find lots of my resources (especially printables) for programs new, old, and upcoming.

This year we’ve really concentrated on the letter awareness.  We done lots of letter awareness and print practice. One week we worked on matching.  We had kids make matches for split up site words and numbers in hanging wall-charts and they played simple memory games.  (I found these Pick A Pair games at the Dollar Tree and they are perfect for this age group because, unlike most memory games, they only have 12 possible matches.  It’s much less intimidating for little kids.)

One week we did stories and songs about shapes and then did a color and shape bingo, which the kids loooooved.  It was a great chance to engage with conversations like, “You have a red heart, but the card says blue heart, so you can’t cover it on your bingo card.  Keep listening, you’re doing a great job!” I got this bingo kit with five small cards from, you guessed it, the Dollar Tree and we enlarged and laminated them so lots of kids could play at once.  We used pompoms as the covering pieces, which they loved.

I found a great activity called Laundry Letters at one of my favorite homeschooling blogs (as I mentioned: if you’re ever looking for great resources about early literacy and learning to read, browse homeschool blogs.  I get lots of ideas from them!)  One of my staff members had already created a template for t-shirts, so she just wrote up some new ones with alphabets.  We laminated them and then had our summer volunteers cut them out and label our clothespins.  The kids then worked on matching upper and lower cases.  We strung “clotheslines” nice and low for them to come match and hang up t-shirts. (Melissa Depper’s great post on how clothespins can be important to development also pushed this one along – you can’t see it but, of course, the clothespins have matching letters on them.)  They looooooooved this activity and it was fun to do something a little more advanced, not just the alphabet but understanding about upper and lower cases.

After that activity we did some upper and lower case practice sheets (cutting and pasting including, build those muscles!) that I bought off Teachers Pay Teachers.  As I’ve mentioned, we use Teachers Pay Teachers and Teacher’s Notebook a lot in the summer – they have great, cheap, clear, usable resources. If you’ve never explored their resources, you should.

We’ve also done activities about ducks and chicks and created and colored mini-books about counting and working on our scissors and pasting skills.  (I found these awesome cut and paste practice books at, well the Dollar Tree, and we reproduced them.  They are easy to build storytimes around thanks to their cute characters and the kids love scissors and glue time.)

I built my storytime on MONSTERS!  I used the amazing Pinboard about Monsters from the goddess at Jbrary for inspiration. (yes, besides videos the Dana and Lindsey also do Pinterest boards.  Is there anything they can’t do?) That’s where I found the Letter Monster at Storytime with Miss Tara. I loved him and knew he would be perfect for the letter recognition.  Miss Tara’s is awesome and made out of felt … but we just whipped one up out of butcher paper on the morning of the program.  It was easy and the kids loved him too. We said the alphabet about 26 times, because we started over for each kid.  The parents might have been a little exasperated but the kids LOVED shouting out the alphabet and I talked to parents about how important actually saying not only singing the alphabet. We used magnetic letters on with our monster taped up to the magnet side of our whiteboard.

After our letter monster activity, we read two monster books: Monsters Love Colors by Mike Austin and the classic Go Away, Big Green Monster by Ed Emberley which they loved so much they were falling out of their chairs.

Then we all stood up and played along to If You’re A Monster and You Know It by Rebecca and Ed Emberley.  Just when they couldn’t GET more excited, we wrapped it up by dancing along to Monster Boogie by Laurie Berkner. We did it twice and they would have done it ten times more.  But then it was time for our activity.

I found roll and cover activities on one of my sweeps through Pinterest and since our kids have been displaying lots of interest in numbers and numeracy, I decided I wanted to incorporate one.  It’s a basic kindergarten math activity since it helps kids connected the different ways numbers are written.  I found some simple roll and cover AND roll and color pages with monsters and then some simple addition and subtraction pages for our kids who were a little farther along. We set out our billion pairs of dice (most of them borrowed from my boyfriend the gamer  but we also  bought several sets of big foam dice from, er, The Dollar Tree.)

(yes some of the sheets are supposedly Easter sheets but no one notice, they just looked monster-y)  We laminated some of them and let the kids play with Goldfish crackers on those.  For the older kids it was good, but the younger ones just wanted to eat, hah. (We had pompoms on hand for allergies or kids who didn’t want the goldfish – pompoms are great markers for littles.)

The kids figured it out pretty quickly and it was interesting to see them counting the marks on the dice then connecting that sum with the numbers. We let them take the roll and color sheets home to play. (Almost all of our Ready, Set, Read! programs have a take home worksheet or project of some kind.)

We only have three more summer sessions of Ready, Set, Read! left but I we’re going to be handing out info about the school year sessions and hopefully that will help.  Even if it doesn’t, it’s still an amazing addition to our summer line-up and I just love that so many patrons love it.  It helps develop staff’s storytime and early literacy skills not just for the program but in general.  We also really relish all the chances we get to educate parents and caregivers about early literacy. This makes them more likely to engage with us about EVERYTHING. (last week a parent asked me for a recommendation for an adult book for herself since “your our librarian!”) It keeps parents and families coming in and it even makes our other younger ages storytimes a little less chaotic.

Have you been developing an early literacy or family storytime at your library?  If so, do you run it differently than you do your younger storytimes?  What kind of games, activities, and crafts do you provide?  What kind of feedback do you hear from your patrons?  What themes have been hits at your library lately? Do you have any questions about our Ready, Set, Read! program I didn’t answer here or you want more info about?  Leave me a comment here or let’s talk about it on Twitter!