What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?
– John Steinbeck
As we transition into December and the holiday season, it’s beneficial to ponder the successes of the month before. As part of our Seniors Community Grant, we welcomed Care Archbold (expressive art therapist) who walked us through a variety of exercises and mediums to create a visual memoir. The visual memoirs included maps of important places in the participants’ lives, a blind self-portrait, and poetry. Everyone created unique and wonderful works of art.
On December 13th, we will be having Adelle Purdham host a memoir writing workshop as part of our Seniors Community Grant. We will learn about memoirs as a genre, experiment with writing short family narratives, and explore new literary techniques. Please bring your writing-in-progress and any questions you have about the memoir writing process.
We are also looking for more participants who would like to be included in the Collecting our Stories home visits. For seniors who can’t easily leave their homes, volunteers will make house calls for those who are interested in writing their memoirs. Stories will be collected to become part of a book at the end.
In November, we created a structured outline of activities for our Indoor Play on Saturdays at the Millbrook Branch. We made Remembrance Day poppy wreaths and wrote letters to Santa. We will be continuing our structured Indoor Play in December with Christmas crafts and card making, as well as candle making and Storytime. We continue to host Junior Mathematicians on Wednesdays at the Millbrook Branch and Junior Scientists at the Bruce Johnston Branch on Thursdays.
We welcomed students from the Millbrook/South Cavan Public School in November for a morning at the library! We had lots of fun picking books, getting library cards, and playing with the technology at the Millbrook Branch. The students also enjoyed a Storytime and craft. We offer library visits on Friday mornings from 10:00am-12:00pm and we ask that you give the library at least 6 weeks’ notice so that we can get all the library card forms done in time.
We have a couple activities which are on hold for December: Community Threads, Cookbook Book Club and the Millbrook Book Club. Check out our newsletter to see what other activities we have going on instead! On December 12th, we have Knotty Knitters drop in from 3:00-7:00pm, Bruce Johnston Book Club at 5:00pm and our Toonie Tuesday Movie at 6:30pm. We will be playing Barbie; dress up in your favourite Barbie outfit and enjoy some pink coloured treats.
As part of our community outreach, we’ve started an Adult Storytime at Centennial Place on Wednesday mornings at 10:00am. Adult Storytime is for individuals who have a physical and/or intellectual disability who enjoy reading and socializing with other participants. We also have an Adult Storytime every Tuesday at the Bruce Johnston Branch at 10:45am.
Did you know? The CMLibraries has a Reading Buddy program to help school aged children work on their literacy and reading skills. We pair a volunteer with a little buddy, and they meet once a week for 20-30 minutes. We will be adding little buddies to our Reading Buddy program for January, so please let us know if you are interested.
The library will be closed December 24th to January 1st. Have a safe and happy holiday season!
For more information on all our programs and activities, please see our newsletter and social media pages. Questions? Email Courtney at cmlibraries.ca
By Courtney Spence, CM Libraries
