Story Time Fun / Tips for Sharing "Singing" Books

The first series of story times that I run for my library in January are called "Book Boogie" story times. They're basically more informal (if you can get more informal than our regular sessions) story times that are heavily focused on music & movement as a way to get kids (and me!) back into the story time routine before starting our official family sessions.  In past years, I picked out wintry books that had lots of fun rhymes and sounds like Jan Carr's Frozen Noses or Nicola Smee's Jingle Jingle.

This year I decided to use only books that "sing" or books based on songs.  I want to use more music and singing in my story times and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try out using a type of book that I tend to shy away from.  In past story times, these kinds of books always seemed really short, or I was never sure if just reading the text was ok, or if we should be singing the text instead.  After a couple of what I thought were very successful story times, there's a couple ways I've come up with for sharing books that "sing".

1. Sing it together!  Sing slowly, with pauses for the page breaks so everyone can follow along.  Even though the kids can't read the words, they're seeing a visual representation of the words they're singing.

2. Singing and reading the song is ok - repetition is good!  Sometimes the written version of the song includes extra or different verses so reading the song and kids are super happy to sing along especially when they know all the words.

3. For shorter texts, talk about what's happening on the page - I used a picture book version of The Itsy Bitsy Spider that included illustrations that fleshed out the Itsy Bitsy Spider's story beyond the text which gave us a perfect chance to talk about the new parts of the spider's story.

4. Use actions or even instruments!  Incorporating the song motions, sign language and even using instruments like bells or shakers is another fun way to add an extra element to singing books.

Maybe these tips are super obvious, but for story time newbies (like me!) they were really helpful.  Some of these things I already do anyway no matter what type of book I'm sharing, but it seems to help when I am more intentional about them when sharing "singing" books.  Watch for another post this week about my favorite "singing" story time books as well!