by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian
Happy Watercade!
Litchfield’s most exciting time of year is here, and the library will be
joining in on Saturday.
The Friends of the Litchfield Library hold their biggest
book sale on the Saturday of Watercade every year. This year that is July 11. They do hold a book sale on the third Saturday
of each month other than July, but the Watercade sale is the most well-known,
with the most traffic.
The Watercade sale will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. This year some of the books will be outside
in front of the library, but most will be in the air conditioned comfort of the
library meeting room. The selection will
be much bigger than it is during the regular monthly book sales.
Proceeds from the sale go to the Friends of the Litchfield
Public Library, which helps to fund library programs and resources. Recently the Friends sponsored a program for
kids and teens to read down their library fines. They help pay for craft supplies for story
time, books for Beginners’ Book Club, supplies and prizes for the summer
reading program, and prizes for the adult winter reading program. Sometimes they fund special additions to the library
collection, such as a boost to our children’s DVD collection in recent years.
The Friends have recently decided to provide a new resource
for our library called Book Page. If
you’ve visited the Hutchinson library, you may have seen it there. It’s a monthly book review magazine that
tells readers about the best new and upcoming books. If you’re always looking for something new
and wonderful to read, you’ll want to pick up a copy; we will be getting many
because they’re intended to be taken and kept by library patrons and book store
customers. We should start receiving
Book Page by the beginning of August. In
the meantime, you can read the whole thing by going to their website,
bookpage.com, where it’s available for free.
It looks fun and useful!
The other exciting thing we have going on at the library
during Watercade Saturday is our teen programming for ages 12-18. We’ve gotten something really fun called a
Makey-Makey kit. In fact, between the Grove City and Litchfield libraries, we
have four of them, purchased in part with teen programming grant money for our
region. Makey-Makeys are called
“invention for everyone science kits.”
Electronic components in the kit hook up to a computer and just about
anything else that can be turned into controllers or keyboards: bananas, Play
Dough, pencils, coins… anything that can conduct electricity. To see this in action, visit the Litchfield Public Library Facebook page, where our teen programming librarian Margaret
posted some pictures and video from the last session on June 15. The preteens and teens who have worked with
this have had so much fun. Come to the
children’s department at 1:30 to do some inventing and plan to be done around
3:15. In fact, if you can’t make it by 1:30, drop in later. You don’t need to sign up ahead of time.
The library will be a very busy place all day on
Saturday. We will not, however, have our
Saturday story hour that day since the Kiddie Parade is happening at that same
time. Walk over from Art in the Park any
time after 10 a.m. and join in the Watercade fun at the library.
