Structuring Programs for Kids

Can we talk a little about program structure? I've read countless professional reference books about storytime and most of them recommend structuring your storytime so that the longest book is read first. That's a good plan if your idea of a good storytime is one where the kids sit quietly and you read. It's advice that has been less successful for me.

Remember my storytime philosophy?

I like interactive stories. But people of all ages, kids and adults, often need to be coaxed into participating. We don't do storytime registrations at my library, so I always have a different group at each program. Even if you require registration for your storytimes and the same people come each week, their moods will be different. Kids can be shy one minute and climbing all over you the next. 

I wanted to show you a little bit about how I decided to structure my shadow puppet program that I am doing over the winter school break this year. I'll be posting more about the stories from this program on the blog later, so stay tuned for that. The typical advice to start long and get progressively shorter as the kids' attention spans fade would leave me with a "set list" looking like this: 

1. Mother Mother I Feel Sick Send for the Doctor Quick Quick Quick
2. Arthur's Nose upcoming
3. The Ant and The Grasshopper upcoming
4. "My Shadow" from Shout! Little Poems that Roar
5. "The Dog and His Bone" (patterns from Judy Sierra's Fantastic Theater: Puppets and Plays for Young Performers--amazing book!)
6. "Shadow Wash" upcoming

I am dissatisfied with this approach for a few reasons:

1. Always someone comes into my programs late and misses the beginning (and thus, the plot setup). That is a huge problem with a story many kids won't know already like Mother Mother. 
2. Several of the stories rely on audience participation and you really need to prime the audience for that gradually. 

I decided to order the stories in a way that would allow people who do not come in on time to not miss the most important parts and so that people would gradually "warm up" to me as a storyteller and participate more.*

Another consideration was that I wanted to end with Arthur's Nose, as we have a tradition of letting the kids come up and play with the puppets after the show. I wanted them to be able to do that without breaking our overhead projector. So I needed to be able to wheel that out of the way before chaos broke lose. 

Here's what the set list looks like now: 

1. "My Shadow" 
2. "The Dog and His Bone"
3. "Ant and the Grasshopper" 
4. "Shadow Wash"
5. Mother Mother I Feel Sick Send for the Doctor Quick Quick Quick
6. Arthur's Nose

*I also use this trick with my recurring storytime pieces that I start each storytime with. "Open, Shut Them" has people simply moving their hands, "Little Mouse, Little Mouse" has the kids guessing colors, and finally they are ready to participate fully making animal noises and movements in "Let's Hear You Roar Like a Lion," the last lines of which prime them to settle down like mice.  

Now I'm curious: How do you structure your programs? What other factors come into play in putting together a "set list"?