How to Run A “Proper” Storytime

By KC Reads

April 1, 2022

With many of you returning to in-person StoryTimes this April, the Storytime Solidarity team has compiled a list of 10 tips for presenting a proper StoryTime so that you do not make a fool of yourself on the day.

1)

NEVER use interest level and interactivity in book selection. Doing so often leads you to silly books that cause the children to invest more time into enjoying the book than properly learning from it. Instead, choose books with denser texts because we all know, the more words a book has, the more the book has to say, thus the more beneficial it is to learning.

To increase learning ten-fold, incorporate having the children write a quarterly term-paper. Make sure to have them graded and returned by the following StoryTime. As they are preschoolers, the reports will be fairly short. We recommend using a red pen to highlight poor spelling and faulty grammar.

2)

GONNA allow parents and guardians into StoryTime? We do not recommend this at all, but if you choose to do so make sure you provide plenty of space for them to stay in the back of the room so that they do not interfere with your proper StoryTime.

To increase the attractiveness of the area, include charging stations, encourage chit-chat, and offer snacks.

3)

GIVE up trying to incorporate music and rhymes into StoryTime! That only encourages rowdiness and lyric improvisation to mess with your carefully planned, proper StoryTime.

The only sound children should be exposed to is your monotone dictation of literature complemented by absolute silence so as not to rile them up.

4)

YOU can, however, on occasion, include classical tunes to which they may not have otherwise been exposed given the advancement of technology. We prefer the melodic tones of the dial-up modem.

5)

UP until now, you may be wondering whether we incorporate any movement at all into StoryTime, and we assure you that we absolutely do not.

Bottoms are meant for sitting, and those little bottoms should be firmly planted in their places from the moment StoryTime starts until the moment StoryTime ends. No sense in having children up and running amuck during a proper StoryTime.

If you are worried about them building strength in their muscles, send them home with one of the books. Have you ever seen a three-year-old toting around a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary? Get the whole set and you have 20 opportunities to build both young minds and young muscles.

6)

NEVER have we used a single felt story in a single one of our proper StoryTimes. How shall children practice their abstract thinking skills if we are just showing them the story on a board? If a story was meant to be shared with children, it would have been written in a book. Those five little frogs can go jump in a lake and stay there!

7)

GONNA need to trust us on this one, but no StoryTime is proper if it includes the use of projectile objects such as shaker eggs, bells, etc. The scarves are particularly dangerous given their unpredictability in generating static electricity and leaving you shocked as a result!

8)

LET it not be forgotten that clean-up after StoryTime is imperative. In our proper StoryTimes, children learn not only how to properly run a vacuum to reach every nook and cranny in the room, but how to buff a bookmobile to a pristine shine.

9)

YOU will also realize the more you get into doing proper StoryTimes that not all colleagues will be willing to, or even able to, run a proper StoryTime.

So that their silly understanding of child development does not interfere with your proper StoryTimes, best not to seek advice from others. Why reinvent the wheel? To make it properly.

10)

DOWN to the last tip and we can see you are probably dumbfounded by how you haven’t been doing a proper StoryTime at all! It honestly is not a surprise to us; you probably never attended a proper StoryTime as a preschooler yourself, so you just didn’t know.