A few weeks (or months?) ago I posted about some audio book talks I created, aimed for grades 2-5, for our library’s SoundCloud platform. I knew that eventually I wanted to return to video book talks, as our book talk audience typically uses YouTube more than SoundCloud (2nd-5th graders), my library has a larger following on YouTube, and YouTube adds a visual element that allows for deeper exploration of picture books and graphic novels.
My first few videos are below. I expect these to evolve over time. They are all edited using the YouCut app through an Android phone. Due to the quick cuts and simple editing, these actually take me less time than an audio book talks–I never like to read from a script, and this format allows me to write out my thoughts but only have to worry about a few sentences at a time–I don’t memorize my script, but only having to talk through 1-3 sentences that take no more than 30 seconds total allows me to have a few potential retakes for each snippet and still be done filming in no more than 15 minutes. Editing takes about 20 more minutes. Of course upload speeds are always changing, but at least that can happen in the background while I work on other projects.
These video book talks span ages a bit more as well, with a baby and preschool title added to the mix.
Learn more about my Virtual Book Talks – with many more video examples – in this post.
Note: Still tired, though I am super excited to have real new books again (instead of eBooks and eARCS). Of course, physical new books, plus eARCS means more reading. This also meant a lot of picture books that I needed to turn around quickly.
Note: I got distracted from reading much of this week by my beautiful baby boy! His front legs are shorter than his back legs and his tail is about 6 inches too short for his body. He waddles and snores and is so weird and I love him. This is Professor “Frankie” Frankleton adjunct purr-fessor of meow-thematics.
I’m going to be honest–this is my third time writing this paragraph and WordPress keeps deleting this draft post. Essentially, this is my last baby storytime for a while, and this is a new book for me this week.
Early Literacy Tip: Sing to your babies! Your voice is better than a recording, and the quality of your voice doesn’t matter. Do you hear me singing on the Internet every day?
Surprise preschool storytime this week! This was a little more tossed together. I’ve also realized I focus so much on counting.
I’m working on bulking up the diverse titles in my home library to help with these and future storytimes. I’m still quarantining books I get from work for a while when I bring them home, so I’ve really been creating storytimes from my home collection a lot, and most of my books are animal focused. This is a part of my personality–I also beg for a lot of animal programs–but I need to expand, and I want to show that in my storytimes. This preschool storytime isn’t a great example, but it is on my mind.
I’m also working on really digging into the musicians I use in storytime and creating a collection of diverse artists to regularly pull from. This project has gotten sidelined more than I would like as I didn’t expect to be quite so exhausted and to lose quite so much time during my work in-building days.
10,000 years ago, in the days that were March, spring break week was supposed to end with an Elephant & Piggie Party. We had borrowed the full body costumes for some guest appearances, I had too many games and crafts planned to fit in our space, and we were expecting a decent crowd–last year’s Paw Patrol event, on the same day and time, had 300 people.
But before spring break, our library closed because COVID, etc., etc., etc., if you are reading this post in 2020 or soon after you don’t need me to rehash the details again. If you have no idea what COVID quarantining was…well I’m surprised this blog is still being used. Hopefully Google still exists too. Anyway, last weekend, I was able to bring part of the Elephant & Piggie Party online with Elephant & Piggie Storytime.
We had a smaller turnout than we would have had in person–just 51 online viewers during our Facebook Live event–but there were many familiar faces and the engagement in the comments was amazing.
To help continue the Elephant & Piggie Storytime fun at home, I curated a PDF packet that we shared with event participants. Download it here.
The general storytime layout is below. I wish I could share the whole video with you because some of the best parts just aren’t in the pre-made YouTube videos. I added a few screenshots for your enjoyment where I could.
Backdrop Setup: Pennant banners and book covers helped make my backdrop more on-theme to increase the Elephant & Piggie excitement:
Elephant & Piggie Intro: We got ready for storytime with my go-to storytime intro song: Shake Your Sillies Out by Rainbow Songs.
Fingerplay: I Have One, I Have Two, I Have Three Little Piggies!
First Book:Let’s Go for a Drive by Mo Willems
I used to perform this book as a puppet show back when I was a teen volunteer, so I’m very familiar with the content. I included some props and got quite energetic in sharing the book:
Song: Elephants Have Wrinkles by Rainbow Songs
Magnet: Piggie, Are You In a Book?
Magnet: Five Elephants in the Bathtub **This was the planned starting point for Pigeon takeover. I made a full video for YouTube, but this wasn’t part of the storytime beyond the introduction.
Pigeon Takeover: I’ve been trying to think of ways to use virtual storytimes to my advantage. In a room full of kids, I could never transform a storytime space like I’m able to by covering the camera for a minute and swapping out decor. Hence, Pigeon Takeover was born.
**Our storytimes are live. This would have been much easier pre-recorded, but it wouldn’t have been half as fun.
How This Worked:
While swapping out magnet pieces from Piggie, Are You in a Book? to start what I told viewers was our next activity, Five Elephants in the Bathtub, I really pressed play on the iPod Touch I use for music (connected via bluetooth to a speaker), starting a Spotify playlist. The playlist contained 7 door knocking sounds followed by the Hot Dog! song by They Might be Giants (Pigeon likes hot dogs!).
Once the knocking started, I pretended to ignore it while making an annoyed face before apologizing to viewers and telling them I needed to check on the door. I’d be right back!
As soon as I was off camera, stuffed Pigeon made an appearance, using a sign to make his opinions known:
I moved the Pigeon Storytime sign up against the camera before swapping it out with a black washcloth. The Hot Dog! song continued to play and my awesome coworker kept the shenanigans going in the comments while letting viewers know to keep watching.
In a minute, I swapped out as much of the decor as I could, focusing on: the books on the bookshelf, stuffed animals, and hanging up as many Pigeon book covers and pre-cut Pigeon images on top of the Elephant and Piggie decor as I could manage. These were all pre-taped and on a table off camera.
I positioned myself with the Pigeon headband and holding some of Pigeon’s signage. I made sure before I started that my chair was close enough to the camera to remove the wash cloth in a clean motion. I stopped the music, moved the wash cloth, threw in a “is there a bird on my head?” joke, and let my confusion show before accepting my fate that I was now in a different storytime:
Book: Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems
Since this was now Pigeon storytime, we had to wrap things up with a Pigeon story.
Closing Song: If You’re an Elephant/Piggie/Pigeon and You Know It!
Note: Wow working in the building again is exhausting, especially since most of my in-building duties involve physical labor. That combined with Elephant & Piggie Storytime on Saturday left me exhausted, and I’m glad I read more earlier this week because nothing was happening after my in building days Friday and Saturday.
No details on these because I’m tired, but these books were particularly awesome:
Note: I’m in that limbo state where you work part time in the building and part time at home so you feel like you are both always working and not working enough….
While we look at moving back into the library (I’m back in the library two days a week now–starting today!), virtual programs continue. We are discussing how to transition to filming in the library, especially since our building will most likely be opening to the public soon, any regular programming spaces are being used for quarantine of deliveries or returns, and an open-office staff space with no area for private filming. Returning to the library gives others staff members who don’t have the at-home tech an opportunity to film storytimes…but that also means restarting a learning curve about the technology and the differences between an in-person and virtual storytime, at a time when the patron expectation in program quality is higher (after all we’ve been doing this a while).
Early Literacy Tip: Babies understand more than they can say. Using gestures, including simple hand signs is a great way to communicate with your little one. More, Stop, and No are great words to practice.
Book:Leo Loves Baby Time by Anna McQuinn
Song: She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain by Old Town School of Folk Music
Last week was an extra layer of busy for me. Each summer for the last three years we have had a Pokémon event. Typically, our Pokemon Party lasts about two hours, has about 200 attendees, and includes trivia, BINGO, crafts, tech, snacks, card trading, and more. The 2020 Pokémon Party was on the calendar…and then COVID happened. Even though this event typically relies heavily on in-library activities and the shared love of a few hundred Pokémon fans in one space, I knew this was one of my must-make-virtual activities.
Pokémon Party turned into virtual Pokémon Week, mostly hosted through Facebook Live. This platform creates some limitations, but it has been our go-to location for most of our virtual programming (and we do still see a lot of familiar faces on there). I created off-Facebook versions of these programs to allow for non-social-media users to also join in on the fun.
Attendance was strong at these events, with 60 active participants in both Trivia and Guess that Pokémon, and about 40 active participants at BINGO.
In addition to all of the shared content below, I also had these three links available for each event:
Very similar to our in-person trivia (except no prizes and easier), our virtual Pokemon Trivia included 20 questions. This was created in PowerPoint and presented using Facebook Live’s screen share tool. Due to the setup, my computer screen was the PowerPoint file, so I had a coworker typing answers to comments, and I verbally responded to some comments after seeing them through the livestream on my phone. Audio and video quality are a big deal as we move farther down the path of virtual programming, and I will never doubt the value of my lovely Yeti microphone (I actually like my voice when I listen back to a recording. I didn’t think that was possible.).
VideoofFacebook Live Event:
Same Event on YouTube: The same trivia content can be found in the YouTube video, though this was created for this platform so the extra content is a little different:
Certificate: At the end of the trivia event, we provided a link in the comments to a printable Trivia Master certificate:
During our in-person event, this is a passive station with images on the wall that attendee’s identify, self-score, and then pick-up a small prize (like a button or bookmark). I made this another trivia-style event.
To Make Your Own CharacterShadows: I used Microsoft PowerPoint, though this should work in any Microsoft tool (and most image editing software):
I found most of my Pokemon images here, though any image without a background can be edited this way.
In PowerPoint:
I pasted the image.
Right clicked on the image and selected “Format Picture.”
In the new options to the right, I selected the fourth image in the new toolbar, “Picture.”
Changed the “brightness” to zero. The image is now solid black.
Day Three: Pokemon BINGO
Pokemon BINGO was a different virtual adjustment–attendees were able to see me this time! There was an extra “step” here–attendees needed to download Pokemon BINGO cards ahead of time and either print them out or play virtually (like in a paint style program).
Video of Facevook Event:
Downloadable BINGO Cards: 100 unique downloadable Pokemon BINGO cards, plus instructions to play at home.
We wrapped up our Pokemon week with our first virtual presenter for the summer, cartoonist Steve Harpster. He taught kids how to draw cartoon-style versions of a variety of Pokemon!
Note: Pushing through as much reading as I can before I officially start partial back-in-the-building work this week, and (most likely) regular back to work schedule at the end of the month. Reading will drop off then between the commute, regular work exhaustion, and the added cleaning measures due to COVID and taking care of folks that are high risk.
Note: I’m back in building 2 days a week now and am feeling extra burnt out. I was already dying from no human interaction and ramifications from the plague, now physical activity that I haven’t done in months and human peoples I don’t know how to interact with anymore combined with online burnout from my teens not coming to programs since they aren’t the same kind of weird fun we normally get to do (I don’t know how to make a Hunger Games Nerf War online!) and I am officially all kinds of destroyed. Positive note, I get a cat this week so hopefully he helps my morale a bit.
Babies, babies, babies! I’m adding a couple new items this week I haven’t tried before–a new action rhyme and puppet activity. I’ve really enjoyed book retellings with toddlers and preschoolers, and I’m going to try to rethink some of my puppet activities to still include those animal noises that are so important for this age while theming them to stories instead of mostly rhymes. Not sure how that will actually work in person, but I think it works well virtually. This was the first time I used Everybunny Count as well–not for lack of trying, as I kept meaning to use it and then I would get sick or something like a pandemic would happen and my storytimes would be cancelled.
Early Literacy Tip: When playing, have fun making noises like animal sounds or truck sounds. Hearing different noises and experiencing different pitches and volumes helps baby’s language development.
Book:Everybunny Count! by Ellie Sandall
Song: What Shall We Do with the Sleeping Baby? by Rainbow Songs
