Storytime is coming back soon! Beginning the week of September 14th, your library will be resuming a regular schedule of weekly and monthly storytimes. Library storytime offers a variety of meaningful benefits to the children and caregivers who attend. Before storytime starts back up for the fall, let’s explore some of these benefits in greater detail. For more information on our different storytimes and when they will be held, visit our Library Calendar.
Ready to go to a Storytime? Take a look at all the ways that regular storytime can help both children and caregivers:
Motor Skills
For young children to gain the skills to move their bodies in different ways, these skills must be practiced and repeated. While participating in storytime, children have many opportunities to practice controlling and moving their bodies in a variety of ways, both large and small. During the songs and rhymes central to storytime, children and their caregivers are encouraged to jump, clap, stretch, wiggle their fingers and imitate many other motions demonstrated by the librarian leading the program.
There is even benefit to a storytime’s freeze dance songs, in the chance to practice listening to and reacting to what the music tells us to do, and suddenly stopping the body’s movement and trying to keep perfectly still.
Print Awareness
Before young children can learn to read, they have to first learn how books work. At storytime, children see the way books open and how they are read page by page moving from left to right. Children are also encouraged to practice using illustrations to support reading comprehension. There is further opportunity to grow comprehension skills through the use of interactive picture books in storytime programs, by following along with the story and doing what the text tells us to do.
Connection
Storytime is an opportunity to form connections, whether they are connections between a child and their caregiver or between different families in our community. Storytime programs are a way for children and caregivers to have fun and grow together by hearing stories, dancing, or listening to music. Regularly visiting the library can also help young children to make connections that associate the library and learning in general with fun and friendship.
There are so many beneficial aspects of storytime. When storytime resumes at your library the week of September 14, we hope you and your little learner will join in the fun.