Soft, spiky, smooth, crunchy

My team is featuring the ‘Adventures’ themed book selection by the Little Big Book Club during this week’s Storytime sessions. We do this every five weeks as part of our rotating focus program, allowing us to promote the resources of this great not-for-profit organisation to our families and save ourselves considerable programming time and effort.

The Activity Time sheet related to When we go Walkabout - Wirruwa Yirrilikenuma-langwa was a simple treasure hunt log encouraging children to explore their senses through their environment. LBBC activity sheets seek to extend the story experience beyond the covers of the book and create a reflection-through-play opportunity. In this case, it has a nature walk in mind, but because we’re limited to 45 minutes within the Library building, we had to bring nature to the children. We served served up bowls offering an assortment of natural and biodegradable manufactured items they might find in their environment: small shells, paper, feathers, leaf matter, slices of stick and sand. Their task was to take an item and decide if it was soft, spiky, smooth or crunchy.

As each child finished their craft and came up to show me their work and get a sticker, I realised how much they’d engaged with the activity. Without exception, each had a feather in the soft box, but I could see clearly in the other categories how they’d reflected on how they’d perceived the items with their senses. Depending on the type and completeness of shells in their bowls, there were classifications of spiky, smooth and even crunchy, some featuring in more than one category. Likewise, the stick slices were perceived differently between children: does the flat surface make it smooth, or does the oblique angle of the cut make it spiky? The sand was a hit, with children experimenting with the effects of using glue compared with sticky tape. One little girl was so keen, she decided to feature it in all categories, but justified how it could be so diversely classified. But the one that intrigued me was the paper. Running around like a headless chook that morning, I decided the supply box needed something else and I tore up some brown paper bags into pieces about 4x4cm in size. I more than half expected it to go untouched but it was quite popular, mostly represented in the smooth category. But one boy decided to scrunch his pieces up before gluing them onto the log sheet; in his experience, paper is indeed crunchy.

All the LBBC activities are lovely, but many are relevant to home or childcare environments, and my library-based criteria and sometimes tweaks are reproducability (preparing for approximately 130 children across five days), simplicity (for children aged 2 - 5 to reasonably do most of it themselves, minimising the adults’ tendency to take over) and generality (ideally something that relates to the theme and doesn’t require a specific book in the selection being read). I prepare the session content and craft 4-5 weeks in advance, usually on the run in between other programming tasks and, I must admit, with a this-will-do attitude. Likewise, session preparation on the day is within a tight timeframe, and my mind is focused on getting all the pieces into place (set up the space and all equipment, read and select the stories, form a song list, think about what to say, etcetera). So it can be a beautiful thing when I can finally stand back and see that my instincts were bang on and the result is a very meaningful creative learning moment. In one way, we were were following the usual Storytime routine of craft-following-stories. But in a more special way, today we were pausing to consider how the elements of the world can appear to us depending on our perspectives.

And yes, I’m not ashamed to admit daydreaming about there being some future professional classifiers in there, inspired by their nice and inventive childhood library lady.