Listen & Learn: Podcasts for Road Trips (Part 2 of 2)
May 16 2022Wow in the World A podcast for kiddos all about cool, weird, and astounding science that makes you go "Wow!". Each episode also comes with a downloadable (and printable!) "WOW sheet" with content to inspire creativity and scientific thinking. Recommended for kids 5+ The…
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Listen Up!: Podcasts for Road Trips (Part 1 of 2)
May 16 2022With summer fast approaching, we bring you four suggestions of podcasts that may be of interest to you and your kiddos to download for those long summer road trips you might be planning to take so you’re not stuck listening to the Encanto soundtrack for 16 hours straight.…
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When Life Imitates Art
February 13 2022Have you ever read Library Mouse by Daniel Kirk? It’s about a little mouse that lives in a public library and loves to read. One day he decides to write his own story (illustrations included) and place it in the library shelf. Soon, his books become so popular that the…
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Christmas Traditions Around the World
December 24 2021Despite celebrating the same holiday, how people celebrate Christmas in different countries varies a LOT. From traditionally having buckets of KFC chicken for Christmas dinner in Japan to rollerblading to Christmas Mass in Caracas, Venezuela (and only in Caracas), celebrations…
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Why Was There a Lion in the 12 Labours of Hercules?
December 4 2021Nemea (the town being terrorized by the lion) is located in Greece. So how the heck did that lion get there? If your guess is "Sometimes menagerie animals got loose and wreaked havoc" you're not entirely wrong; it's not the reason the story features a lion but menagerie…
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Book Scorpions & Why You Should Love Them
October 31 2021If you were to flip open a book and find yourself facing what looks like a really tiny scorpion without a stinger traipsing around a page of the book, you might (quite understandably) scream bloody murder and a few choice bleep-worthy words that would make even a drunk…
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Memorable Libraries Around the World: Versailles, France
October 23 2021The world’s largest scent archive, Osmothèque, is both a scent library as well as one of the world’s most renowned centres for research on the topic of the history of perfume-making. They have over 3,200 scents, at least 400 of which are discontinued and historical.…
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The Middle Eastern Library of Alexandria
October 15 2021In 1258 Mongols under the command of Hulagu Khan sacked the city of Baghdad, destroying the House of Wisdom (the leading library in the leading intellectual center of the Arab world at the time). It was a loss of Library of Alexandria proportions, to put it mildly. In…
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If You Like Dav Pilkey You Might Like...
October 8 2021There comes a day in the life of every Dav Pilkey fan where they finish reading all of his books that he’s written so far and must face the dreaded Wait until the next book release. To help our young patrons through such trying times, we have humbly compiled a list of…
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Memorable Libraries Around the World: Ikawi City, Japan
October 1 2021Ikawi City’s Picture Book Library (aka the Museum of Picture Books) features about 1,300 picture books by authors from around the world. The picture books are all geared toward very young children, as the library serves three local preschools Mondays to Thursdays (Fridays…
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If You Liked Outlander You Might Like...
September 24 2021What about Outlander did you like the most? I liked it because it’s a time travel romance The Scribe of Siena by Melodie Winawer When neurosurgeon Beatrice Trovato travels to Siena to get her late brother’s affairs in order she didn’t expect to find information about…
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All You Need to Know for the 2021 Federal Election
September 16 20211. If you haven’t registered to vote No problem! You don’t need to have registered in order to be able to vote! All you need to do is find out where your polling station is by visiting the Elections Canada site and putting in your postal code into the purple voter information…
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The Most Famous Game You’ve Never Heard Of
September 10 2021Once upon not-so-long-ago, in the mid-1800s and early 1900s, there was a housing crisis in the United States and around the world. The rich minority would buy undeveloped land and housing and lease land and living spaces for exorbitant prices, becoming richer simply by…
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The History of Games In Libraries
August 29 2021There is a perception among the public (and even among librarians!) that games are a fairly recent advent to public libraries, first appearing perhaps sometime around the early aughts give or take by way of video games. While games are fairly new additions to libraries…
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What Kind of Bear Is Baloo?
August 21 2021Rudyard Kipling never said what kind of bear Baloo is meant to be. However, due to the descriptions found in the series, his behaviour, feeding habits, and the location of where the story takes place (Seoni, Madhya, India) greatly narrow down the list of possibilities.…
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Little Red Riding Hood: A History
August 13 2021Revised, reworked, or simply reprinted, folktales are a huge part of our lives. It’s practucally a rite of passage of childhood to learn to memorize the core folktales from one’s culture. In modern times we often tend to think of folktales as relatively static, with…
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Is (Mythological) Loki Good or Evil?
August 6 2021If you follow Marvel’s Cinematic Universe or read their Thor comics, you likely think of Loki as being unquestionably one of the bad guys (and occasionally an antihero). And you would be correct about Marvel-Loki. But how did the Norse view the God of Mischief? Was Loki…
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That’s the Oldest Story in the World!
July 30 2021Do you know what’s the oldest story in the world (that we know of)? If counting oral tradition, the oldest would probably be the Dreamtime tales told by Australian Aborigine peoples, which accurately chronicle information regarding the change in sea levels as far back…
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Judging a Book By Its Cover
July 24 2021Whoever came up with the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover” didn’t know much about book publishing. Judging a book by its cover is exactly what you’re supposed to do. The entire job of a book cover is to give you a general idea of what kind of book you would…
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Book Art: Giving Old Books a Second Life
July 16 2021Books, like living things, have life cycles. Some cycles are short, some long, but inevitably, there comes a day when every book reaches the end of the line of its bookish life. Book lovers dread that day, especially when the book in question has reached its end due to…
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