Storytime at the Red Balloon

Saturday morning, I spent storytime at The Red Balloon Bookshop, a wonderful indie children’s bookstore I don’t get to often enough because it’s across town. They invited me to do a storytime to help celebrate I Love to Read month. Here’s a 1:26 minute slideshow of what we did.

The kids at storytimes are generally toddlers/preschoolers, a bit young for my books. I read a poem or two from Stampede and BookSpeak, and I read the whole text of A Leaf Can Be…. I tried to bring everything to the audience’s level. We did monkey noises for the Stampede poem. We did a group poem, A Kid Can Be…, for A Leaf Can Be.… And we did the little mini-accordion book as a group for BookSpeak. Everything went pretty well, and The Red Balloon, as always, did a terrific job of setting things up.

One highlight was that someone was buying A Leaf Can Be… as I was setting up, and she had no idea I was there. An un-coerced sale–so exciting!

And they gave me a lovely thank you gift certificate to the store, so of course I had to shop. Ignoring the amount of my certificate, I picked three books, two I already know and love, and one new one:

Lemonade and Other Poems Squeezed from a Single Word

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village (I can’t lay my hands on my copy)

In the Sea (David Elliott’s brand-new companion to On the Farm and In the Wild)

6 Responses

    1. Thanks, Susan. One advantage to being way too busy is that I don’t have TOO much time to stress out about speaking engagements, even ones that don’t feel like the best fit for my work. I still over-prepare, but not nearly as much or as often as I used to. :>)

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    1. Thanks, Susan. One advantage to being way too busy is that I don’t have TOO much time to stress out about speaking engagements, even ones that don’t feel like the best fit for my work. I still over-prepare, but not nearly as much or as often as I used to. :>)

      ________________________________

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