Young Writers Award 2013

To all young aspiring authors!

This is your chance to prove your talents to a wider audience than the one residing inside your creative mind.

The Young Writers Award is open to all South Australian students from Reception to Year 12. It’s open topic and you can submit poetry or prose up to 1000 words.

For  more  information about entering this cool event see the South Australian English Teachers Association website. Entries close Friday 24 May so get writing!

The Youth Space Has Had a Facelift!

This year the youth space in the library has seen some colourful changes including the addition of new coloured shelving, comfy cushions and couches, and snazzy study facilities. The final addition to this funky yet functional space is a painted mural that has been designed and produced exclusively by a team of artistic young people aged 13-19 years of age. Over a period of two months, the creative youth team has worked hard to create a visual representation of what they think reading is all about, and the finished product displays an eclectic mix of images symbolising the endless possibilities of the imagination.

A big congratulations to the team for their efforts and an open invitation to all to visit the new youth space and check it out!

Enter our Change History competition!

If you’re aged between 13 and 25, enter our Change History competition for the chance to win an Amazon Fire tablet PC. 

We are asking you to creatively ‘improve’ a photo from our local history collection, as we’ve done here. Use your Photoshop skills or some good old art and craft to go crazy and change history!
See the website for all the details.

School Holidays are fast approaching…

…which means that it is time for the School Holiday brochure and all the wonderful activities and events that it contains.

You can collect a copy of the brochure here at the Library or from the Golden Grove Arts Centre and the Turramura Rec Centre or from HIVE 12-twentyfive.

You can also access an online copy on our website or on your smart-phone by scanning this QR-code:

Get ahead of the rush - book your places in the events soon!

There’s so much on offer for children and youth in the City of Tea Tree Gully these holidays – we hope to see you there!

Youth Area Refresh Update!

Our Youth Services Officer had a very good day on Wednesday (July 20th) with the arrival of the new furniture for our library’s Youth Area. Key pieces in the gradual refresh of this area have been placed in the newly expanded space – a raised study table with drafting chairs for four plus five modular lounge chairs for curling up on with a good book or to chat with friends.

Need to study for exams? Try the new study table in the Youth Area.

Crash out on our couches with mates or for some quiet time with a book.

A place to study, hang out, read, chill, and relax.

Video may have killed the radiostar…

But it could help sell books to the NOW genereation.

Something is afoot on the Internet… books (or at least the people producing the books) are using a new tactic to get our attention and convince us to buy them – The Book Trailer!
Now, according to http://www.squidoo.com/booktrailers: Book trailers are …similar to movie trailers, in that they are designed to build interest in an upcoming or current novel… just like the trailer for a new movie. However, where the maker of a movie trailer has all the clips from the film to pick from to create their trailer. With a book trailer, the maker … has to convert written words into visual images…. and the challenge they face is that they need to convey a sense of what the book is about without giving anything away – and without really clearly defining what the characters look like, as most readers prefer to visualize what they are reading about as they imagine it themselves. Most book trailers run from one to three minutes. They can be anything from the author reading a passage from the book, to an elaborate mini-movie.

 
(Hush, Hush is available to borrow from both our Adult and Teen Fiction collections.)

Think you have what it takes to make a trailer for your favourite book? Know a creative teen who needs a new challege? Random House Publishing has the competition for you!

So come and borrow your favourite book, brush up on the details and get your creative juices flowing! And if you’re not sure where to start or what to do, why not have a look in the catalogue for some books to help you along?

Comfy purple and green chairs?

You may recall a survey and some design workshops for the soon-to-be revamped Youth Space occured over Summer.

A plan has now been devised for the Youth Space to be slightly extended, to include a dedicated group study space, and a lounge area for young people. 

We recently visited a furniture showroom to ‘road test’ the chairs and were pretty happy with the results!

Laminates for the bench top and fabric for stools

Fabrics for the lounge chairs

Expect to see changes starting mid year, and further involvement from young people with the finishing touches!

Any comments welcome!

Create a place to hang out…

We want to know what youth in TTG want their space in the libary to be like. From our survey over the holidays, we know you want it to be comfy, a space for study and hanging out, relaxing, casual.

Our final workshop is on this Saturday to show some pictures of potential furniture, discuss layout and colours. Modern or retro, bright or muted, the choice is yours.

Miller’s Duct Tape Lounge Chair

Email Benita.wheeler@cttg.sa.gov.au to RSVP to the workshop on Sat 5 Feb 11:30am in the Library.

Tea Tree Teens LOUD lock-in these school holidays

It’s time for teenagers to take over the Library…well, for one night at least. This Thursday night (20 Jan) from 6pm to 9pm there will be music and games and run of the Library for 13-18 year olds. Choose a CD from the collection to play on the stereo, then challenge your friends to a game on Wii Sports or Playstation.

Have some laughs with Twister or Celebrity Head, check out your favourite sites or do some random net surfing. It’s up to you! To book in, give us a call (8397 7333) and have your Library card handy. I promise no one will ‘Shhhh!’

Playing with Paper?

To be honest, until we were looking for ideas for the Dec/Jan holiday programme, I’d never heard of 3D Papercraft. And then another member of the CYS team showed me the book “We Are Paper Toys” by Louis Bou, which features the work of a wide variety of artists, designers and other creative minds using paper to create amazing and unique 3D toys/models from paper.

The book that gave us the idea...

Google 3D Papercraft and you’ll get approx. 1,350,000 results – including recreations of people’s heads from photo images, tugboat models, iconic computer game characters, buildings… the list goes on. It seemed like a perfect choice for a workshop aimed at 13-18 year olds.

Of course, this meant that now I got to play with paper myself in order to create the examples that would go up around the library as advertising for the workshop. And what an experience that has been!

First I found out the hard way that you really need to be working with at least a large A4 pattern… cos A5 is toooooo small. Also, ordinary paper is just too flimsy, poor little guy can barely stand up.

For something so small, he sure took a lot of time and effort...

Working on Max also reminded me to have glue on hand at all times… he’s held together with sticky tape for the most part and it just doesn’t look as good.

My next efforts were on a slightly larger scale… Undead George and Werewolf Michael Jackson.

More lessons on what not to do when playing with paper...

With Undead George I discovered that printing the pattern out in greys doesn’t look very good and colouring in with texta only mildly improves things.
However, he did teach me that the simpler patterns are definitely the easiest ones to work with. (Not really a big surprise, that one.) And that scoring the fold lines before you start trying to make the model does, in fact, make things much easier!

Werewolf Michael Jackson was a very good lesson in why you can’t use a glue stick to make these awesome toys/models – it just doesn’t work. The glue doesn’t hold things together and takes too long to dry… very frustrating when working with something as intricate as this pattern turned out to be. So sticky tape came to the rescue again… until craft glue stepped in and saved the day entirely.

This little bunny proved a challenge.

And finally, I took all the lessons that I learned from the previous three toys/models and had a go at “Nodder” …

Ta daaaaa!

and another simple pattern that creates this little guy:

Come along to the workshop and see what you can make for yourself!

 

 

Craft glue may be fiddly and scoring fold lines may take time, but it is totally worth the time and effort for the end result.

So if you’re 13-18 and would like to have a go at making some 3D Papercraft models/toys of your own, we would love to see you at the workshop on January 20 from 3pm-4pm!
Make your bookings via the library.
All the equipment and 3D Papercraft patterns will be supplied.