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Library programming changing up in June

Results of a survey are leading to some programming changes at the Thompson Public Library in June. “Story time will be changing at the beginning of June,” says library assistant Amanda Sanders.

Results of a survey are leading to some programming changes at the Thompson Public Library in June.

“Story time will be changing at the beginning of June,” says library assistant Amanda Sanders. “We ran a survey in April and it turned out that the times that we were running our story times weren’t all that ideal for that many people. So we have decided that at the end of May we will be ending Thursday story time and we will be moving Saturday story time to two in the afternoon.”

Both Thursday and Saturday story times had been at 10:30 a.m. for at least the last eight years, she said.

The library is also offering a new program for future readers.

“We are going to run a Friday morning baby story time which is a register-only program,” Sanders said. “We have 13 babies registered so far as of May 4 and we were originally only opening it up to 10 but it filled up the first couple hours so we announced that we might do a second session if we need to, if we have more than 15 babies registered.”

There won’t be any weekday programming for toddlers until the summer.

“Then later in the summer we are going to run a toddler program on Tuesdays in the afternoon,” said Sanders. “That’s a toddler sing and dance program and that’s going to be register-only as well and we also are going to be holding a registration-only summer reading program. We used to do a drop-in in the past but we decided that most of our programming is going to be register only.”

The only remaining drop-in program is the Saturday afternoon story time and the reason for moving to a registration-based system is to ensure that the time staff spends preparing is not wasted.

“It takes time to prepare a program and when one kid shows up that you’ve put a lot of effort into because you didn’t know how many kids were coming, it’s disheartening.”

The library also has three more workshops in May, including a wine and paint night with Bronte Hendren on May 12, which costs $40 per person, and, closer to the end of the month, a henna workshop at a cost of $15 per person and a kids’ gardening workshop with a fee of $5 per participant.

“The kids’ll get to take home a bulb and a bean that they’ve planted and they can watch it grow at home and they’ll get to learn how to take care of it,” says Sanders.

Money charged for the workshops goes towards the cost of supplies and honoraria or workshop fees for the workshop conductors.

“It does not go to the library unless it’s reimbursing us for supplies that we’ve already bought,” Sanders said.

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