Singing in Storytime

Storytimes are back in session and the library is booming with business—preschool and toddler business that is!  Librarians are working hard to make sure that children attending Library Storytimes are enhancing their pre-reading skills because believe it or not, reading starts way before school ever does!  The things we include in our storytimes are simple things that you can do at home.  Over the next few weeks we will share our Storytime Secrets with you so you can work on those pre-reading skills at home.

Singing is one of the important features of our Library Storytimes.  In the toddler class, you may have noticed that 80% of the storytime is repetition of the same songs from week to week.  Children receive many benefits from the singing and repetition.  You don’t have to know how to read to sing, so anyone can do it at any age (babies and toddlers included)!  When a child learns a song he/she is committing the sounds to memory, and they are also separating the syllables of words without even realizing it.  When children do start learning phonics in school, it is much easier for them to translate the sounds to letters if they are already familiar with the sounds. 

Singing provides great benefits to children and doesn’t require much effort.  You can sing anywhere—the car, the bath, the doctor’s office.  Sing songs you like with children, or if you don’t know any songs, simply check out our amazing CD collection, or we also have many nursery rhyme books you can read with your child if that is more your style.
 
Simple suggestions for home:
 
Play “Storytime” at home.  Have your child lead a storytime with stuffed animal friends.
 
Once you learn a song, get silly with it!  For example, instead of saying “Hickory dickory dock the mouse ran up the clock” you can say, “Snickory, snickory, snock” and see if that gets any laughs!  Then you and your child can come up with other nonsensical rhymes.
 
Clap out syllables to songs or words in songs.

Sing songs with actions like The Goldfish by Laurie Berkner (that's the song we are acting out in the picture)