Not just books

By Jason Gabak / Special to The Citizen

Thursday, February 21, 2008 11:52 AM EST

AUBURN - Most afternoons, the children's room at Seymour Library is a pretty busy place, with story hours and other activities to get children involved with books and reading.
Sam Tenney / The Citizen
Ally Germinara, 4, and her mother Kathy decorate paper dragonflies to place on a mural at Seymour Public Library on Wednesday morning.
This week, along with all the normal activities, the library is hosting a plethora of special activities during the winter break.

Library director Sheila Anderson said that the library has hosted these kinds of special activities for a number of years.

“I know we've done this for a lot of years now,” Anderson said. “It gives kids something to do and gets them here in the library.”

But this year it almost didn't happen.

“We were actually thinking about not doing this,” Anderson said. “But then we thought about it and we realized that this is something that people have gotten used to over the years and they look forward to it so we decided that we needed to do this.”

Anderson, along with the rest of the library staff, put their heads together and came up with a variety of activities to keep young children busy while they visit the library.

Games like cup-stacking, puzzles and crafts projects have been particularly popular and continue to be this year.

“It is a drop-in program,” Anderson said. “It isn't an all-day camp or anything. It is just little activities that the kids can do when they come in with their parents and they can have something fun to do while they are here.”

On Wednesday afternoon, the day's activities consisted of helping decorate a large mural that adorns the hallway entrance of the children's room of the library.

The mural depicts a rain forest scene and children were given the opportunity to decorate spiders, birds, flowers and other rain forest creatures and post them on the mural wall.

Izaiah Canino, 5, took the opportunity to make his first visit to the library Wednesday morning along with his grandmother, Lorraine.

While there, Canino was also anxious to check out the rest of the library, particularly the computers.

“It is a lot of fun,” Canino said. “I liked making the spider and grandma made a flower and we got to hang them up on the wall and I made one to take home. And I get to play on the computer. I like to play games, like Snood - that is a lot of fun.”

From his grandmother's point of view, little activities like these make for the perfect way to spend a winter day.

“I wanted him to be able to get out and do something a little different,” Lorraine said. “I think it is great they do things like this here.”

Anderson said that once spring rolls around, the library will be hosting more events geared toward children.

During April in particular, Anderson hopes the library will be a busy place.

“National Library Week is in April,” Anderson said. “That is Turn Off The TV Week, so we'll be doing a lot more then. And more for teens and adults, we'll be doing library tours, sort of explaining what goes on behind the scenes at the library and telling them a little bit about what we do and talking about library careers.”

If you go

What: Winter break activities

When: Beginning at 10 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 21, cup-stacking; beginning at 10 a.m. Friday, Feb. 22, game day

Where: Children's room, Seymour Library, 176 Genesee St., Auburn

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