Outdoor Storytime

I started doing outdoor Storytime sometime in August. It’s been awesome! We’re currently under a ridiculous amount of construction at my library, so even if Covid-19 wasn’t, I don’t know that we’d be having indoor Storytime. All our program rooms are either in the construction zone, or serving as storage or staff space because the normal staff and storage space is under construction. So I do outdoor Storytime in the nearest local park, and it’s lovely. It was small when I started, but as soon as Labour Day arrived, it suddenly went from 6-7 people to 30-40, which is really nice—many of the people who come are friends I haven’t seen since the last indoor Storytime I did, back in March 2019.

So what do we do? Well, blankets are encouraged (and I always bring a few extra that I wash between uses), and we spread out on as much ground as we need to keep everyone properly distanced. I wear a mask, because Storytime without singing is not a thing I can countenance, and I encourage adults to mask if they’re going to sing along—I’m more than able to do all the singing at Storytime if need be!

We read 2-4 books, and I walk them around as much as necessary so everyone can see the pictures. We sing or rhyme about twice to every book, and I keep going as long as I have interested kids. Given we’re near a playground, they haven’t seen other kids much for eons, and it’s usually garbage pickup around the park, that’s often not more than 15 minutes but that’s fine! I don’t expect or want to compete with a playground or a garbage truck.

Everyone seems really happy with outdoor Storytime, and the only bad thing is that we can’t do it more often, and probably we won’t be able to go past mid-October because weather. So many people were not terribly enamoured of Virtual Storytime to begin with, and especially not after a year and a half of it, so I’m desperately trying to figure out what we can do to engage all these lovely people once the wintery weather comes!