A Treatise: "Why We Love You for Offering, but Why We Cannot Let Volunteers Do Story Hours"

You may have heard that, due to city budget cuts, we have been directed to lay off our Children’s Librarian, one of two full-time positions in that department. This has forced us to cancel our Monday morning story time (one of seven weekly sessions).
Several kind and generous patrons have come forward since this announcement, offering to fill in and do that story hour. Most have kids of their own, or grandchildren, some are former teachers, now stay-at-home moms. All of these people have certainly read their share of stories aloud to eager young listeners.
One young woman volunteered for this task because, she said, she remembered how her attendance at our story hours twenty years ago impacted her life. She told us that, on one occasion, she snuck out of house and walked to the library despite her mother’s insistence that she couldn’t attend that week because of her bronchitis. So you see, story hours are among the most important things we do.

While we fully appreciate the sentiment of these story-hour volunteers and applaud their generosity of spirit, there are a multitude of reasons why we cannot accept their noble propositions.

1.) Story Hour is just that. One hour in a small room with 20-22 wiggly preschoolers, no parents allowed. It takes a great “handler” to manage the group; to understand how to gently guide group behavior; to know when the kids need to get up and move around; to trigger their need to verbalize, sing, stomp, or occasionally even yell.
2.) For many young children, this may be among their first group activities without Mom or Dad present. It’s a progressive learning experience as their weeks in the group progress: socialization and friendships with other children develop, listening skills improve, and independent behavior grows in this new situation. Some are shy, others are outgoing and it takes many skills to bring everyone along happily.
3.) Our Children’s Room story team takes great care to plan, months in advance, for each session. A theme is selected (e.g. ducks or snow or gardens) for each week’s stories and potential titles are debated and finally chosen. The staff then virtually memorizes the text in each book so that they’re not “reading”, they’re holding the book up, facing the children, so that the kids can see the illustrations.
4.) Interspersed among the stories are a variety of extra activities: these may include a simple snack (e.g. Teddy Grahams during the teddy bear theme), a related short film based on a book (e.g “The Snowy Day”), a flannel board story, a craft (e.g. making a crown during royalty-themed week), or even planting some seeds.
5.) Singing and dancing is also a prerequisite. Familiar tunes, finger plays, sing-a-longs, and creative movement are a part of every story hour. Our storytellers must also be actors and minstrels.
6.) What happens after story hour is also very important. Over the course of each six-week session, the story-giver learns about each child and also gets to know their parent. This librarian, based also on her knowledge of children’s literature and pre-literacy building blocks, is then better able to suggest appropriate and enjoyable take-home books for each child, and provides a familiar face at the desk each time that child visits the library.

It’s for these reasons that the Dover Public Library Children’s Room has waiting lists for its story hours. These are the reasons we have people standing in line on registration day. Our story hours are quality productions, a little bit theater, a little bit magic, a lot about keeping children enthralled with books and turning them into lifetime library users.
It’s for these reasons that we don’t embrace the idea of “Drop-In” story times as happens at the big-box bookstores. We prefer to put our efforts into more personalized “high-touch” (and we hope “high-impact”) storytelling sessions. It’s because they’re well-planned, well-rehearsed, and professionally done by our multi- talented Children’s Room’s staff that we cannot use just anyone to tell the stories we want to tell.

If you would like to help in another way, the Children’s Room could use volunteers for some behind-the-scenes work, especially with craft preparations. If you can help on a weekly, regular basis, a couple hours at a time, and don’t mind “running with scissors”, please speak to one of the Children’s Room staff!