Today marked the end of “Crafts in the Park” for the summer of 2017. Every Friday for the last seven weeks, the Whistler museum got together with the Whistler Public Library to host a fun story time and craft activity. This was the fourth year running the event, which will be sure to continue in summers to come.
The Whistler Museum and Public Library team up in Florence Petersen Park for fun Friday crafts.
Each year has a new theme, and this year’s theme was, “A Journey Through Whistler’s History”. Our crafts travelled from hundreds of years ago with the First Nations, all the way to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, with crafts to match each point in history. The first week was extra fun, as we joined up with the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre, to make traditional First Nation’s dreamcatchers. For week 3 we built our very own Rainbow Lodges, just like Myrtle and Alex Philip back in 1914. Although, ours were built from rainbow coloured popsicle sticks, and weren’t big enough to live in.
This girl made the roof of her lodge extra special. We never ceased to be proud of how each child’s unique craft turned out.
Week 5 was “Fun with Fishing”, which had to be held inside due to the dense smoke in Whistler. However, the craft was still one of the favourites as the magnetic rods actually stuck to the metal mouths of the fish! Some of the other favourites included, “Beaver Builders”, “Giddy Up Horsey”, and “Travel by Train”.
This little girl come almost every Friday, and loved how the cute little beaver could actually fit into his beaver dam.
Three kids proudly showed off their horse crafts. They could stand on their own!
Each hour began with a couple interactive stories read by Julie Burrows from the Whistler Public Library. This was followed by a short history related to the theme, and an explanation of the craft by Sierra from the Whistler Museum. The kids would then get to try out the craft for themselves.
Besides week 5, we were lucky to have nice weather almost every Friday. We usually had about 21 kids, and they all seemed to enjoy both the outdoors and fun activity. Sometimes the kids would add their own touches to the crafts and make them even better and more exciting than we planned for. We even had some kids who showed up every week, always excited for another craft.
Parents were always keen to help their child out, sometimes doing much of the craft themselves. (Many of them seemed to enjoy it more than they might admit).
See you in 2018 for another summer of Crafts in the Park!
WHISTORICAL 