Library!

This week has been so much fun, I’ve absolutely adored my time at Mandurah City Library. The staff have been so welcoming and friendly to me and the office is a really enjoyable work environment to be in. This experience has been so valuable to me as previously I had never had experience working in an office. Throughout all previous employments and volunteering opportunities, it’s always been totally different to office work. All of my knowledge towards working in an office had come from the IT Crowd and “have you tried turning it off and on again?” really does fix all technical issues.

This week was same routine to last week with art and craft activities taking place in morning at 10.30am and more activities taking place in the afternoon at 1.30pm. One of my personal favourites from this week has been a talk from Rupert Wainwright, who came in to speak about his new book: Miss Muriel Matters. Muriel was one of the famous Suffragists in London at the time and has since been forgotten about. She was an Australian born in Adelaide and moved to the UK to pursue a career in acting but became a leading woman in the fight for the right to vote. I really enjoyed this talk as it was someone who I had never heard off and it was also really beneficial to be able too talk to Rupert Wainwright, the author and gain a better understanding of Muriel Matters.

Another aspect about this placement I’ve really enjoyed is being able to build relationships with children and family members of those who have been frequently attending the workshops. The library is a really relaxed and enjoyable environment and I’ve loved being able to have a laugh with the children as they have become more and more comfortable with me over the past fortnight.

Another highlight of this week was SciTech.  Scitech is a world renowned and multi award winning not-for-profit organisation that operates the Scitech Discovery Centre, a permanent, interactive science museum which includes a planetarium, and is located in West Perth, Western Australia. However, SciTech came into the library for an interactive workshop with the children. I had great fun watching it and the children were very happy to be there. The morning workshop was aimed at children aged 5-9 was eagerly accepted by the pupils. All of the demo experiments would be fantastic to use within the classroom. The demo workshops concentrated on ‘mixing’ science, using products easily found at home in either the kitchen or bathroom.

My favourite was the home-made lamp. A lava lamp can be easily made using water, oil, food colouring and effervescent tablets. i will definitely be using this experiment and others from Scitech as the kids absolutely loved it!