National Science Week begins on 12th August and to celebrate, we are excited to introduce our new resources from Children’s Discovery.
The Whitsunday Regional Library collection now contains Spark! Junior Discovery Boxes which are themed science and nature sets intended for children aged 3-5 years of age, to explore together with parents/carers at home. These boxes are available for loan and topics include Light and Colour, Magnetism, Measurement and Sound.
Future children’s library programs will now include activities from Little Bang Discovery Club which utilises everyday objects to help children and their accompanying adults to learn the basics of science: collecting, classifying, measuring and experimenting. As part of these resources, children are loaned their own Little Bang Discovery Box during the session, containing an assortment of treasures for curious minds to discover.
Following on from this, our libraries are also equipped with facilitator sets and participant boxes from the Little Bang Discovery Plus program. These provide further discovery science experiences for children aged 4 years to early primary and their parents/carers. Additional ideas are supplied to continue investigations at home. Small groups and families can enquire directly with branch staff to access these resources for use in the library space, outside of scheduled program times. Consideration will need to be given to the applications of the contents in each kit and possible impacts on other library users/library furnishings. This may be suitable for home-schooling groups and/or individual projects.
For older children, we can now offer Big Bang Science resources to facilitate STEM-related activities in our library branches for those aged 5-8 and 9-12 years. Accompanying adults are always welcome. Topics for these kits include DNA Extraction, Sounds of Silence, Tricks of the Eye and Wind Things.
