The birth of American (English language) storytime

While talking to my friend M, I had an ephiphany....
Why pay 4€ per storytime session at the British Cultural Centre when we can do it ourselves for free? I thought long and hard about how to handle it and then it came to me. Me, the daughter of the librarian.

Last week, I walked into the Wazemmes branch of the Lille public library and told them I'd like to organize English story time and would they be interested. The director was rather reserved but after talking to her, I could tell she was delighted.

Rather than organizing a seperate English storytime, she would prefer to piggyback English storytime onto the regular storytime which currently takes place the first Wednesday and Sunday of the month. She explained her logic : they are already have enough trouble attracting participants to French storytime so she would like people to get used to the storytime idea.

When I get back from the US in November, I will meet with the library and the regular story tellers to see how we can organize a bilingual storytime. I already have tons of ideas of course. We can do a bilingual reading. We can use multimedia. We can use puppets. The world is mine! Oh wait, I'm getting carried away here...

Stay tuned for more information on English-American storytime in Lille (I hope that's obvious enough to get hits).