April Storytime: a blessing

I was wondering if my storytime was maudit (or cursed) because 2 days before storytime, the head librarian called me to tell me that Emilie - the librarian who I was supposed to do storytime with - had changed services and she wasn't sure who would be my french speaking counterpart. Since I couldn't come meet with the librarians beforehand, I gave her the idiot's guide to storytime.

When my brood and I arrived for storytime, there were already some familiar faces waiting for us. In fact, all of the faces were familiar since they were all part of my following ie people who I know or who I've personally invited. I was really glad to see Rachael and her two boys (she's a faithful reader). Just as we were about to begin storytime, a woman and her young son walked in. I didn't know them. Yay! I'll take that as a sign of success. In fact, storytime was published in the official Lille library agenda which means that anyone who cared to pick it up at any one of the branch libraries in Lille would have seen storytime on the dochet. Once again, there was a librarian from another branch present as an observer.

Marie - my new counterpart - and I took about 45 seconds to go through the plan and then started. We begin with the welcome song, followed by two bilingual books where she read the FRench and I read the English : Ma Cousine Dit Hello and a bilingual tale from a kid's magazine called Tralalire. We then read Bark George (Aboies George) by Jules Feiffer and I Like Books (J'aime les Livres) by Anthony Brown. A round of Head and Shoulders was thrown in there as well.

The kids seemed happy! The bilingual format worked well. I read a page in English followed by Marie who read the same page in French. It worked well because the books were short. But if we'd chosen longer books, I would have opted for an alternating style where I read one page and then she read the next page in French.

Even Suzanne best friend (the one who wanted me to read in French last time) was interested. I realized that the reason the library hasn't been pushy about it is because they are very excited about storytime but don't want to ask too much of me. Au contraire, ask ask! So, instead of storytime being cursed, I think it's blessed.

The next storytime is scheduled for May 18th at 3:30 PM. There is also a date in June. More dates to come...