Spooky Singalong

This program was the brainchild of my wonderful and talented partner in crime, the other youth services librarian at my branch, Sara. She conceived, named, and planned this whole thing. Hopefully she will have her own librarian blog soon so that I can link to her entry about Spooky Singalong and give her all the recognition for this incredible event. Until then, here is my take as one of the staff members who helped set up and run it......

First of all, I will not be writing up our actual Halloween storytime and parade because I didn't get enough pictures of our super cute tiny patrons in their costumes, nor did I get permission from any of their parents to share those pictures in a public forum such as a blog. So here is a picture of me, Sara, and our temporary (she is getting a promotion!) third youth services librarian Nicole on Halloween day. I am a unicorn, Sara is a dinosaur, and Nicole is the human embodiment of the spirit of Halloween itself. 

Now, for the Spooky Singalong program. We did a Disney Karaoke program during Summer Reading, which was an awesome success with almost 100 people coming to sing iconic Disney songs and dressing up as their favorite character. So for Halloween, we had a similar program with some troubleshooting that we learned from the Disney event. 

First of all, most of the participants at a weekday program are not yet in kindergarten, so they are not fluent readers. Instead of playing actual karaoke tracks with words on the screen but no vocal track, we played songs with vocals intact. Second, instead of have children sign up to sing one by one (like karaoke in the real world), we structured this program as a storytime/karaoke hybrid and called it a singalong!

The prep for this program was insanely easy. Sara found a great playlist of preschool Halloween songs with animated videos, and we projected it on the wall of our programming space. There were rows of chairs set up, but everyone was encouraged to get up and dance around as we sang. 

In addition to their Halloween costumes, which most of them wore because tomorrow is Halloween, there was a craft station set up where kids could cut out and decorate their very own cardstock "monster feet." Sara printed the templates onto cardstock a couple of days ago, but we did not cut them out ahead of time; manipulating scissors helps develop fine motor skills! (Plus, less craft prep). After the feet were cut out, there were art supplies available to decorate them.

Here is a video that is 30 minutes long, and almost the exact same as the playlist we used. All the music played for the Spooky Singalong were from Super Simple Songs, which I know I've shown on this blog before in my storytime entries. 

One song that we did use for the Spooky Singalong that is not in the compilation above was the Halloween version of Baby Shark. I couldn't not include it in this entry, so here it is separately: