Storytimes Begin Again!

First some exciting news!!!  After TWO years of begging and pleading we finally got two preschool tables and 12 preschool chairs!!  It is so great to have "age appropriate" furniture for the children and they love to sit at the tables to do their activities. (Thank you Mr. Mier for "finding" the money for this!!)

Over the last few years I have been working on adding additional early literacy skills to preschool storytime.  This year I added additional print awareness exercise.  Each nursery rhyme now has sentence strips, so when we repeat the nursery rhyme together I point to the words.  I found this idea (and many of the sentence strips) from these books.

I wrote a letter to the parents/caregivers explaining why I do some of the things I do during storytime.  Most importantly I wanted them to know that I was not trying to teach their child to read using the sentence strips--it was just a way I could better incorporate print awareness.

Parent Letter

This fall I am also doing an afternoon storytime for children ages 4-7 (preschoolers and homeschooler).  We'll see how that goes.  If it is mostly just preschoolers who come I may not prepare a different storytime, but just use the alphabet one.