Storytime encourages a love of reading, stimulates kids’ imaginations and offers an opportunity for social interaction.
Talk, sing, read, write, & play every day
Your storyteller will share fantastic picture books, stories, songs and rhymes. Parents, grandparents and carers are all welcome. Sessions involve a craft activity and adults are essential to this part of the session.
Sessions are weekly and last between 45 minutes and an hour.
Find a session
Program details
Ages: 2-5 years old
Bookings required: No
Cost: Free
Locations, days & times:
- Coolbellup Library – Wednesdays – 10.30am
- Spearwood Library – Tuesdays and Fridays – 10:30am (Except school holidays)
- Success Library – Tuesdays and Fridays – 9.30am (Except school holidays)
Tell me more about Storytime
Storytime is a mixture of reading, rhymes or songs, and a craft. Every part of Storytime is designed to develop children’s cognitive or physical abilities.
Reading – Early literacy
Reading is an excellent exercise for little brains, and big ones, because it introduces a range of topics that might not be familiar as well as increasing the range of language that children are exposed to. Beyond that they are being immersed in the grammar, structure, and fun of language.
Reading the same books again is also a great exercise for children’s comprehension and memory skills. At this stage of early literacy repetition is one of the best things you can do and some books will never get old no matter how many times you read them.
We also do a range of rhymes:
- Number rhymes – which teach counting as well as number awareness.
- Silly rhymes – that encourage children to have some fun.
- Action rhymes – that get children moving and thinking about their body as well as developing their gross motor skills.
We also do some songs, from traditional to new, as well as little activities such as a letter for the week – aimed at developing sound awareness and letter recognition before school in a relaxed way.
Get crafty
Storytime always finishes with a craft or activity. This involves something different every week from free form activities designed to develop creativity and independent thought to structured creations.
Children are asked to:
- Colour – to develop the hand muscles they will need to write, colour, or paint as they get older.
- Cut and glue – which develops hand-eye co-ordination and fine motor skills.
- And a range of other little tasks – that all encourage muscle development and physical skills.
There are also special weeks (like Mother’s Day in May) where the craft is even more special than normal.
Regardless of what we are doing from week to week, there will be something for children to take home with them that relates to the topic to deepen their connection to the stories they have heard and is something tangible that they can share with family that could not come along with them.