PD Posting- observation of a children's program

I went to observe a storytime at my local library.

I hadn’t been to a storytime since I last worked in a public library earlier this year. I worked in a public library in a very multicultural metropolitan area and I have now moved to a less multicultural, more remote area, and I wanted to see the difference between storytime programs. Things that I looked at were the demographic of the people attending, the format of the program and the materials used. The storytime had an insect theme, with a book with bugs as characters to start, followed by ‘incy wincy spider’ which was sung twice as the first time didn’t have very many of the children doing actions. Then the next 2 books were ‘the very hungry caterpillar’ (a personal favourite of mine J) and then ‘itsby bitsy spider’. They sung ‘row row row your boat’ in between the other books, which I didn’t think fit the theme but the children seemed to enjoy it, and then the last book was followed by a goodbye song. There was a small group of children and their carers, a mix of boys and girls from the ages of 0-5 years from various backgrounds. I personally felt the one father present appeared to feel outnumbered by the amount of women; however he was very interactive with his children and sang songs and performed actions enthusiastically. There was no craft activity which I have never experienced before, so I can confirm not all storytime programs are delivered in the same format .It will be interesting to further investigate how different libraries conduct their storytime programs and develop a format based on the observations of how the participants appear to enjoy the programs. The theme chosen was very safe as it was fairly generic, where all the participants could understand and enjoy the program regardless of their background. Another storytime format which was very different to the one I attended today was a bilingual storytime held at my old library in Ryde NSW. It highlighted the diversity of the community as there were community members from various backgrounds in attendance, although none of them appeared to speak the particular language of the session I attended, which was Greek. The community has a very large Chinese and Korean population and I was informed that these sessions were usually quite full. The need for Children and Youth librarians to maintain a culturally sensitive stance when delivering programs  is crucial as awareness and respect for the cultures which children come from could potentially model their future information seeking behaviours as adults. Even if they are first generation Australians with parents from overseas who have recently immigrated to Australia, the great amount of influence which parents have on their children will contribute to whether or not these children grow up to become frequent library users or not. Ryde’s method of acknowledging the diversity of their community was effective and entertaining, the storytime today was a good example of a generic storytime that appealed to children from all backgrounds, without focussing on the diversity of its participants.