Where in Barrie can you take a robotics bootcamp, see a puppet show or watch a 3-D printer in action?
It’s the same place that’s running a Wild About Barrie scavenger hunt, a chess program for teens and database searching for entrepreneurs.
If you haven’t been lately, you’re overdue for checking out the Barrie Public Library.
With an image of a staid, dust-covered repository for books, the Barrie Public Library is anything but.
It is a community gateway to exploring and learning.
A 3D creation in the works at the Barrie Public Library.And it’s one place to plan on dropping by each week to see what’s new – and just not on the Grab & Go shelves (which is the convenient near-the-entrance spot where you’ll find best-sellers you can sign out for 10 days).
Every summer, I had encouraged my school-aged son – who would rather be building his house and working on Roblox – to read.
In his mind, however, books are too linked with teachers and school and he has always resisted opening one book, let alone four, five or six, over the holidays.
But the BPL has had a cure for that – Readopoly. There’s a program from age three through to Grade 6, which has them rolling the dice to find interesting things on the shelves: not only are kids encouraged to pick up a book.
They could pick up a graphic novel, a comic book, a picture book or anything an older parent like myself wouldn’t consider. The librarians that encourage the kids to roll the dice are more than helpful: they managed to get my reluctant reader to return each week in search of something new to read.
That was last summer.
This year, when my 12-year-old returns from Scout camp, he can enter Teen Territory, where there’s a reading BINGO, an Instagram challenge and a Lego robotics bootcamp.
And although my son could be discovering his teen years with Harry Potter and Hermione Granger, he isn’t; but for those who are, the Painswick branch offers Quidditch for teens on July 28.
The Teen Territory is shaped by the vivid imaginations of a teen advisory council, which in the past has explored poetry as well as literature and our community.
But what seems more in place at the Ontario Science Centre than in the downtown library is the 3-D printer, which is to your right as you walk in the main doors of the downtown branch. It’s an amazing sight to see, a curious piece of technology.
The day I was in, the machine worked gracefully to create a game piece – like what I’d used for Sorry!, a board game that was big when I was my son’s age.
Sorry, I was not. As usual, I am quite grateful for what I find in our library.
Libraries today are where you can not just find answers but discover new questions, questions you’d have never considered or imagined – and the library has the answers to those questions too.
