Find an event you'd enjoy at the library

by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian

As spring continues on, our library events do, too. If you’re a reader, a gamer, or a knitter, mark your calendar for our ongoing groups and one-time special events.

We’re hosting a reception to congratulate Nancy Paddock on her Minnesota Book Award win. Join us in the meeting room on Saturday, April 28, from 2-3 p.m. Nancy will speak for part of the time and will otherwise be available to talk with people. We’ll serve refreshments. This is a big deal in the world of books in Minnesota, so we need to celebrate.

4-H at the Library meets after school on Thursday, April 26. It’s open to kids in kindergarten through fifth grade. Darcy from the Meeker County Extension Service always has a variety of fun and educational activities for the kids to do, and it’s free to attend. Through the school year, we host this on the fourth Thursday of every month. We’ll have it a couple of times this summer, too; watch for our summer schedule to find out when.

I’m going to reduce game night to one Monday a month plus some Saturday events. Look for our choose-a-game night, with a selection of chess sets, board games, and card games, on the first Monday of the month from 6:30 – 8 p.m. This means no game night on April 30th; come on May 7th.

We’ve had an enthusiastic response to our Dungeons & Dragons nights with requests for more time to play, so we had a Saturday afternoon event on April 21. We’ll do it again on Saturday, May 19, from noon to 4 p.m. If you enjoy making up stories along the lines of Lord of the Rings and the Drizzt Do’Urden books, or if you like to play World of Warcraft, you might find it fun. It’s very social but much more slow-moving than a video game, and you have to use your imagination.

Knitting club is still meeting on the first and third Thursdays of the month from 4:30-5:30. Their next meeting is May 3rd.

The next meeting of the after-school book club is Thursday, May 10th. They’re reading Mary Poppins this month. This group is for 3rd through 5th graders.

Story times will continue through May 11th. At that time we’ll have a break of a few weeks while Jan hosts elementary school class visits and we get ready for the summer reading program. We are getting all set for summer already.

One last note about something that isn’t an event: I have a survey running through April 30th on how ebooks are affecting the use of print books. If you’re an ebook reader, whether you check them out or buy them, I’d love it if you took the survey. You can follow the hyperlink at the beginning of this paragraph to the online survey or you can pick up a paper copy at our front desk. Thank you to all of you who have taken the time to take the survey.