All posts by Karen

About Karen

Karen (she/hers) is a Culinary Literacies Specialist at the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre library. When not in the kitchen, she can be found knitting, reading, and repeating.  |  Meet the team

Storywalks on City of Vaughan Trails

, ,

If you’ve been to the Kortright Centre since 2018, you may have noticed the StoryWalk panels along the trail showing you one page of a story at a time as you make your way along the path. This year, VPL is excited to announce that, in partnership with the City of Vaughan’s Public Works Department, VPL is expanding the StoryWalk offerings across the city!

With the province under the current Stay-at-Home order since April 17, hitting the trails is a great way to exercise outdoors while still staying in line with the lockdown restrictions. And what better incentive to get outside and explore the trails spread throughout Vaughan than the joy of discovering stories as you walk these paths? As you walk along the trails, you’ll discover one page at a time, until you’ve read a whole book at the end! It’s a fun, educational activity for the entire family that also brings the library to families during these times when we can’t visit the library the way we used to be able to.

Image of Nature Backpacks in a rowWhile you’re out on the trails, why not check out our Nature Backpacks, which come with different themed activities, tools such as magnifying glasses or binoculars, books, and identification sheets, all in a backpack for easy carrying! And for the cyclists among us, don’t miss out on our Basic Bike Maintenance online program happening Thursday May 13 – just remember to register on Eventbrite!

The StoryWalks are being installed this week, and will officially be launched in early May to celebrate Canadian Children’s Book Week and Public Works Week all at once. Each of the five wards of the city will be getting a StoryWalk along a public trail, in addition to the one already at the Kortright Centre, so head to your local trail for some fresh air, outdoor exercise, and an engaging story that unfolds along the way! And of course, remember to use the hashtags #LoveVPL and #PlayVaughanLocal if you post any photos from your StoryWalks on social media!

Continue reading →

The Way of the Househusband and… Burnout

, , ,

Book Cover of The Way of the Househusband Gokushufudou by Kousuke Oono Volume 1I don’t know who needs to hear this (everyone?), but The Way of the Househusband is getting an anime (Netflix) this year, so if you haven’t yet discovered this hilarious, wholesome and infinitely uplifting manga series, check it out before it comes out on Netflix – you won’t regret it: Cute puppers? Check. Incredible artwork that captures expressions that border on grotesquely realistic but remain firmly rooted in the manga style? Check. Non-sequiturs flying about based on puns and misunderstandings (because Tatsu is a former yakuza who looks the part)? Check, check, check! A surprising feminist icon highlighting how much invisible labour housewives take on, giving value to that labour and making sure everyone he encounters understands how much work being a house(wife/husband) is? CHECK.

Continue reading →

Pi(e) Day

, , , ,

Book Cover of How to Bake Pi by Eugenia ChengI know basically every celebration of pi day (March 14, because pi = 3.14…) turns into a celebration of pie, and I’d never say no to pie, but what if we could celebrate with delicious pies while also learning more about what math is at the same time? Conveniently enough, Eugenia Cheng, author of  X + Y, has already done this for us:  How to Bake π.

Now, I’m going to take a bit of a detour away from tasty delicious pie and into the world of knitting for a brief moment. Upon asking a college classroom what came to mind when asked about mathematics, math professor Sara Jensen found the top two words were “calculation” and “equation”. Asked the same question, professional mathematicians gave quite a different response: “critical thinking” and “problem-solving”. Which prompted Jensen to “eliminate pencil, paper, calculator (gasp) and textbook from the classroom completely. Instead, we talked, used our hands, drew pictures… And of course, we knit” (Jensen, Why I Teach Math Through Knitting), in an attempt to bridge the gap between how students approached math (calculating equations, memorizing proofs…drudgery) and how math could actually be used as a tool, engaging learners by making the learning interesting and more hands-on. I’ve joked before about how I’ve done more linear algebra while knitting than learning it in class, and certainly with more of a vested interest in how the abstract numbers translate to the physical object! And I’ve also thanked Pythagoras before for imparting his theorem to us while figuring out how to calculate length as I knit on a bias. In fact, I have found myself wanting to engage more with math as I knitted more and more, making alterations and designing my own items – it’s all the same math I learned by rote back in school, approached with a lot more enthusiasm now in comparison, and willingly at that!

And it’s exactly this work of transforming how we think of math, from equations and calculations to problem-solving and critical thinking, that Cheng does in How to Bake Pi. She makes math fun to learn, and accessible to audiences of varying levels of math knowledge, which is quite a feat!

Continue reading →