Create A Great Storytime At Your Church

Hosting a storytime in your church can be a great way to get to know your community, to provide an opportunity for intergenerational connections, or to give an outline to a Sunday school classroom for babies or young children. Setting up a storytime structure is best kept simple, but if it’s done intentionally, it can become a framework for lasting, meaningful connections between kids and parents in your community of faith and beyond.

Keep it Short

Storytime should not be long. Start to finish, twenty to thirty minutes is good. Alternate between listening and interactive movement to keep kids engaged. You can provide open play and connection time after to allow families to linger and chat.

Incorporate Movement

Select some songs, fingerplays, and rhymes that will be the mainstays of your storytime. It is an excellent idea for these to be common tunes or repetitive so that people can easily catch on. This album, 100 Bible Songs and 100 Bible Stories by The Wonder Kids, has many classic, as well as some more unknown, fun songs to try. This church offers some PDFs of fingerplays they use that you may want to check out.

Model For Parents

Storytimes provide a great way for parents to experience how they might engage faith with their children at home in non-threatening, playful ways. You can occasionally point out to parents something that they could do at home as well. For example, “When I tell a story, I pause after the story to let kids wonder aloud— This can easily be done by parents at bedtime, too.”
Be mindful that the way you talk to children and the kinds of questions you ask during stories, etc., will be a model for parents. But, you can also remind them that they do not need to do a full storytime or family devotion time to incorporate the songs, stories, and conversations you all share together into their daily lives.

Invite Response

Many storytimes end with an art project or activity. What would it be like to end your storytime with a brief time of response to God? Maybe select three different ways of responding to God and cycle through these at first, moving on to different ideas later. Some ideas to experiment with are a short prayer song, sharing a gratitude, drawing a picture, or a breath prayer for kids.

Conclusion

Whether you do a one-time storytime or choose to do a series of them, this is an excellent way to engage kids and families and to model tools they can use at home in the future with their kids as well.