Librarians dish on how to make kids pay attention during story time. (Note: not as per headline, nor by hiring Margot Robbie to read in a sultry voice to middle-aged poets.)
I never intended to be a children’s librarian, so when I was hired as one, I was pretty in the dark as far as how to perform a successful and meaningful storytime. Fortunately, I was gifted with a really excellent coworker who did phenomenal storytimes (“Where’s Mr. J?” would be a refrain I’d hear at storytime for more than a year after he was moved to another location) and had the opportunity to attend equally amazing training sessions with Dr. Betsy Diamant-Cohen, the executive director and designer of the Mother Goose on the Loose. I also gobbled up as much information as I could on strong storytime planning and learned an immense amount from Soraj Ghoting and her Storytimes for Everyone. Now almost three years on the job, I recognize that many of the caregivers who come to storytime are just as uninformed about how to get the most out of storytime as I was when I first started, if not more.
