What is online storytime? Online storytime started when San Francisco instituted shelter-in-place in March, 2020. The idea is to entertain small kids, give their parents a break, and entertain ourselves. It’s a half hour (ish) of stories, singing, and, perhaps, some other fun things. Who’s behind online storytime? I’m Lucy Bernholz, you can learn all about my professional life on this website, lucybernholz.com. Reading to my child when he was young was one of my favorite parts of parenting and I like to read to my neighbors’ kids – re-creating that was the idea behind online storytime. The other readers are friends, family, and colleagues of mine who also like to read, sing, and act silly. How do I get the info I need so my kid(s) can watch/listen to online storytime? Sign up using this form. On Tuesday/Wednesday prior to each storytime we’ll send an email with the login info for that week’s zoom call. We do this to try to protect the call from creeps and/or horrible people. That’s also why we don’t use some of the media tools that would make this easier – keeping this fun and safe for little kids is harder than it should be. How do you choose what to read? We mostly pull from our own bookshelves and our memories of what we loved when we were 2-6 years old or were reading to kids that age. We’re also drawing from books recommended by parents, the public library, commonsense media, teachers, and others. Can I read, sing, or act silly with you? Probably. Fill out this form and we’ll get back to you. If you are not known to me or someone in our reading circle we’ll have some questions for you. This is a fun space for little kids and we’ll do everything we can to keep out…creepy or horrid people. And, yes, I am the arbiter of creepy and/or horrible. Do you record the storytimes? We don’t, because I don’t want to ever put video of anyone else or their children online without specific permission. If enough people are interested and someone can show me how to record a video call without any chance of participants’ videos being captured – we’d consider changing it. Can I request books or songs or other silly things? Sure. There’s space for that on the signup form. You can also email me using the contact lucy page noted above. We’ll do what we can.