By Julia Beauregard
Hometown Weekly Editor
Children from Needham gathered together within the Children’s Room at the Needham Free Public Library (NFPL) on Valentine’s Day to partake in creating a multitude of holiday themed crafts. The event was hosted and supervised by Paula Dugan, who is the children’s supervisor at the NFPL.
Dugan runs the craft activities program in the STEAM center, which typically runs once per month for pre-k and school aged children. However, they will run additional crafting events for special occasions, such as holidays.
“We do crafts, so the kids can keep them or use them as gifts,” Dugan stated, which is an excellent way to teach the participants to give gifts from the heart. This program also provides the children to express their creative energies through experimenting with the variety of projects available.
For Valentine’s Day, the STEAM center offered five different crafts such as Valentine emoji stickers, which allowed the children to create their own emoji faces, Cupid in heart garden, which was an interesting craft, which involved placing a cupid figure in the midst of pipe-cleaners, with hearts attached. The other crafts included making heart foam glasses and love plugs, and etching on magic color scratch hearts.
The children made their rounds to the variety of craft tables, giving their best hand at each and every activity. All the participants worked diligently as they moved through each station.
It was plain to see that the heart foam glasses were the most popular craft, as the children took their time decorating the spectacles, then continued to wear them as they worked on their other art pieces.
Dugan moved throughout the children’s room, alongside her two volunteers, to aid the children in any way they needed and to help answer any questions they had as they worked. The little artists had helping hands from their parents, grandparents, and nanny’s alike. It was a wonderful activity with ample memories made for the children of Needham who attended.
For more information and to stay up-to-date on the crafting event schedule, check out the NFPL website: https://needhamlibrary.org/
