And we must tell the stories to children. It has been said of one
library and, moreover, with some pride, that the story hour was
so popular that many grown people came to it; indeed sometimes
there was little room left for the children!
Thirdly, the average library does not sufficiently consider
whether in its particular case, story telling is the best tool at
its command. What is a good tool in one case may not be in
another and a given library may be sacrificing much better work
when it takes time, as it must always do, from something else for
the story hour.
Often a small library has no story teller upon its staff, but it
may be doing effective work with children through its work with
teachers, its visits to schools and its children's room. It has a
small staff and no room adapted for telling stories at the
library. Obviously such a library has no need for the story
telling tool, yet many libraries like this are struggling hard to
use it. Once a week or oftener they are allowing all the usual
routine of the library to be upset to accommodate the Story Hour,
the story teller has spent many hours of preparation and is under
a strain that is little short of misery, and the children,
because of the general difficulty of the whole situation, are
deriving no greater love for books nor respect for the library.
Such a library would do better to give up story telling and put
its energy into what it could do more effectively.
But here let me say that often the small library thinks it has no
use for story telling as a tool when as a matter of fact it has.
Children's librarians in large or small libraries count school
visiting as part of their work. The school visit offers the best
of opportunities for the work of the Story Hour. A story told at
the end of an informal little talk about the library will bring
the children flocking to the library the minute school is over.
The small library which has no Story Hour room but which has a
story teller can take advantage of this opportunity and do much
with it. The story teller can visit three schoolrooms on
different days, tell stories to forty children each time, and
because the story telling is distributed over the three days,
manage with comparative ease the influx of 120 children who may
come for books as a result. More than this, the story teller can
have told three stories instead of one, so that only one-third of
the children will clamor for the same book. This last point is
important as all who have had story-hour experience know.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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