The only thing more fun than reading a good book is reading a good book to a child and watching the excitement on their face grow with every turn of the page.

Kim Hazen, the children’s librarian at Guernsey Memorial Library, gets to see that excitement firsthand several times a week, as she runs through her half-hour story time routine. On Tuesday, I went to the library to work with Hazen and see some of that excitement for myself.

I arrived at the library at 9:30 and quickly realized that being the children’s librarian involves a lot more than just picking out a couple books for story time. After nearly three years in the position, Hazen explained her responsibilities include picking out new books for the children’s and young adult’s sections of the library, keeping up the collection, planning activities and workshops for the library’s younger readers and working with the children, which Hazen said is her favorite part of the job.

Each week, Hazen holds story time on Tuesdays and Fridays. On Tuesdays, the children’s librarian prepares for two different sections; the first for pre-school age children, and the second for infants and toddlers. For each event, Hazen chooses a different theme, and all of the activities done that day center around that theme. On Tuesday, the pre-school story time activities centered around a theme of friends and feelings. “Generally the themes are seasonal, based on the weather or holidays and others are just thrown in based on whatever we’re doing,” Hazen said. She explained the friends and feelings theme was chosen because of Valentine’s Day.

After setting up for the day’s craft project, making a happy clown face out of construction paper, the children started to arrive. We directed each to grab a mat and sit on the floor in front of Hazen’s desk. At 10 a.m. eight children had arrived. Most, Hazen said, are returning customers. “Once in a while we see a new face, but the same ones are usually pretty consistent until pre-school.”

After signing the regular song “The More We Get Together,” to kick things off, the story hour officially began. Before the stories were actually read, Hazen did a few activities with the children, starting with an interactive counting activity called, “Counting Friends.”