WHITEHALL — The Whitehall Community Library’s staff pride themselves on making lifelong learners.
From Reader's Theatre to STEM classes, the Whitehall community library offers a variety of free programs to nurture literacy among generations of community members.
The Reader’s Theatre program offers beginning readers a chance to perform new stories and stories they love.
The Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) class is run by Robin Holliday.
Holliday takes 48-week long projects and condenses them into an hour for students to understand the basics of STEM.
"Science should be for everyone - it’s really nice for them to be able to do some fun science in addition to what they get at school," said Holliday.
Holliday likes to learn from previous students because sometimes their projects turn out better than the ones she makes.
"I like to watch what they create. Last year we did these with giant plastic food service gloves and one of the boys decided he didn’t like that and asked for a piece of cardboard and created one more like this so this is what we're going to go for this year because he was better than mine," said Holliday.
Jeannie Ferriss says that the variety of programs they offer create community and even lifelong friends.
"Our storytimes have created this wonderful playgroup scenario where they get together, they visit each other's houses, they take their kids to the park in the summertime and they met through our story hour program," says Ferriss.
Arts and craft classes, storytimes, book clubs, and a new program called Read and Feed which is in the works with the local food bank tackle the library’s mission of nurturing a smarter community.
"It builds their literacy. It builds family literacy," said Ferriss.
