By: Kate Fitzpatrick, Spanish CLEL Bells
One of my challenges as I plan storytimes every week is boosting engagement. I lead a bilingual storytime every Monday and I’ve noticed that it is harder to engage young readers who are just starting to build their language skills. This is especially challenging when their primary language is English and they attend storytimes to help them start to learn Spanish. The short attention spans feel even shorter some weeks!
I repeat a lot of favorite songs, stories, fingerplays and felts in my storytimes. Repetition helps everyone learn and helps children and caregivers know what to expect. Repetition also makes storytime fun and boosts engagement; it’s more fun to sing along when you know the words!
One of my favorite songs and books to repeat is Ten Little Birds / Diez pajaritos, by 123 Andrés. It is a bilingual board book that counts down from 10. There is also a song and a music video to go along with it.
Usually, when I read the book, I like to use a felt board to illustrate the story. For this story, I made a roof out of brown felt and 10 birds out of different colored felt. The birds are cute, and easy to make out of felt scraps. I just cut out various round shapes for their bodies. I use hot glue to stick on googly eyes, felt wings, a triangle beak, and rectangles for their legs. If you don’t like making felts, you can also print out images (I use graphics from Canva) and stick felt or Velcro to the back.
During storytime I start by placing the roof on the felt board. Then we place the 10 birds above the roof, counting as we go.
On each page, two birds fly away (dos se marcharon). When this happens, I let two different children take a bird from the board. Then we count again to see how many are left (¿Cuántos quedaron?).
This repeats until there are no birds left. When the birds start to return, we count them one by one as children put them back on the board.
This setup usually works for my storytimes when I don’t have more than 10 children who want to participate with felts. If there are more children, and I think we can handle it, I do the story a second time, but to music, allowing them to take turns. If it feels too hectic, I do the felts myself, but that doesn’t happen often.
After the story, we usually play the song and have a bird dance party. We flap our wings like birds and count down on our fingers. This mix of activities is fun for all of us, and everyone seems to enjoy it. It’s a great way to incorporate SING, PLAY, and WRITE, while developing language and fine-motor skills. It’s also nice to be able to show grown-ups another source for children’s music!
