Kids At Storytime In A Cozy Library Coloring Page

Three children sit cross legged in a row on a rug, and the child in the middle holds an open book out where all three can see it. Both pages of that book are blank, so there is somewhere to write or draw before the coloring starts. Every face is finished: two round eyes, a small nose, a smiling mouth and a full head of hair on each one. All three wear striped shirts and striped socks, which gives the lower half of the sheet a rhythm nothing else on it has. Behind them a tall bookcase climbs past the top edge with four shelves of upright spines, a lamp hangs from the ceiling on a cord, a leafy plant sits in a pot at the left, and a hoop of small leaves is pinned to the wall above it.

The shelves are the long job. Forty spines at least, each a separate closed shape, and no two quite the same height.

The striped shirts and socks pay back anyone willing to alternate two colors steadily across a run.

Children read to in a group pick up vocabulary faster than children read to alone, and the cause turns out to be the talking around the book rather than the book itself. The questions do the work.