Switching Up Story Time

So, the regular story time lady was out this week and one of the other librarians lead us in her stead. No big deal, right? Except it was bad enough that if the change is permanent and the new leader continues to do what she did this week, we'll be looking for another library. We're giving her the benefit of the doubt because it was just her first week, but listen to this. Story time is half-an-hour. That's plenty of time for bunches of stories with a few songs mixed in, right? But somehow we only got to hear 2 stories, which weren't exactly read, but acted out instead. We did get to listen to our fearless leader scratch out the same tune ("Twinkle-Twinkle," "Baa Baa Black Sheep," "ABC's," you know the one) on her violin 3 or 4 times and then later we were treated to a couple of less recognizable tunes on said violin. It's cool that she can play the violin and that she wants to share it with our children, but these kids are toddlers. All of them. And they were done with the violin after the first run-through of Mozart's K.265. And she sang for us, but most of the songs were songs that nobody knew and the melody wasn't clear enough that we could even pick up the chorus and sing along with that. So "story time" this week looked like this:

VIOLIN "singing" (stories).

And most of the children lost interest within the first 10 minutes. One little boy even tried to get out of the room. I disagree with his mom's decision to make him stay, by the way, but that's just me.

Like I said, it was just her first time. Hopefully she will learn from her experience this week. I don't think that she should try to exactly duplicate the other librarian's story time. I'm just saying that the other format works and so maybe there is value in not completely changing it. Also, the violin? Not her best tool. Just saying...