Nursery Rhyme Time is a drop-in, literacy-based activity program for families of preschool children. It was designed as a way for branches without a Saturday storytime to provide literacy-based preschool programming on the weekend.
The program has three parts, and branch staff can choose to present any or all of the parts, depending on their time, space, and staffing: a short Mother Goose storytime, a craft, and several activities.
Each activity is based on a familiar nursery rhyme and is designed to enhance one or several typical preschool skills. For instance, in the Hey Diddle Diddle Spoon Relay, children pick a plastic bowl marked with a certain number of dots, walk to a bucket of spoons, and choose as many spoons as dots in their bowl, and walk back, balancing the spoons in the bowl. In the Three Little Kittens Mitten Match, children look under upside down pie plates to match mittens by color.
The rhymes are displayed at each station along with instructions for the activity and a literacy tip for parents to read. Parents may also be given a handout with a description of the program. Children can collect a small rhyme card at each station, which can be stapled into a construction paper cover to make their own nursery rhyme book to take home.