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I am way behind on reading and responding--just posting has been a challenge! City Mouse and Earthheart, my storytelling friend Batsy Bybell found the Rumanian story about how dragonflies came to be. I will ask her if I can post it here. It's a great story, and fun to tell. I use an iridescent dragonfly puppet to tell it, keeping the puppet hidden in my pocket until the very end of the story.

Priscilla, I didn't get to the goat story this time. We did Who's in Rabbit's House, a song called A Fly Walked into a Grocery Store and created endless variations to it together. I also told two Anansi stories: how he stole wisdom, which I tell with my thumb piano, and Budwaysolema, which I tell with my tongue drum. (For those who don't know Anansi, he is a folklore figure from Africa, the original spiderman--but he doesn't wear a red suit. He's a man and when he's being a trickster he's a spider. He gets into a lot of trouble trying to outwit others. There are many, many Anansi stories, and all are fun to tell, because they began life as oral tales and not written tradition.)

I also told the story of Brer Rabbit and the Mosquitoes, and we sang The Flea Song. At the second library, I told the story of Turtle and the Storm using insect and turtle puppets and to follow up, Turtle of Koka--not a bug story, but one kids all love, and since we were talking about turtles it felt like a natural follow-up. I also used my string to tell the story of The Mosquito which is so fun because the kids mouths drop open when the string comes un-knotted.

The challenge at the second library was its size and the age of the audience. The library is very small, and there were about 20 children there, plus their parents. The children were all ages, but a goodly number were under 6, so that is why I selected different stories to tell--I needed highly interactive tales since we were so close together. It felt more like a conversation and playtime with my grandchildren, but it worked and I felt like I knew those children well by the time we were finished.

I want to try the goat story too, Priscilla, along with several other new ones I've been learning for this summer. I'll get a chance to try them in a couple weeks when I have more library shows.