Community & Business
22 May, 2026
The GIL Library Hub News - May 19, 2026
In a first, the Sydney Writers’ Festival Live and Local will be screened at The GIL Library Hub
The GIL Library Hub
Sydney Writers’ Festival Live and Local - this week!
This week, for the first time, a large selection of the Sydney Writers’ Festival Live and Local program will be screened live at the GIL Library Hub!
The event will run over three days, with a total of 10 one-hour talks screening live. All talks are free of charge, and everyone is invited to come to as many or as few as they wish.
There will be a one-hour break between talks- a perfect opportunity to enjoy a coffee with a friend at one of Gilgandra’s great coffee shops. Or you may like to bring your lunch with you to enjoy in the GIL Library Hub as you watch one of the lunchtime sessions.
The talks include authors such as Yan Martel (Life of Pi, Son of Nobody), Stephanie Alexander (The Cook’s Companion), Robbie Arnott (Dusk, Limberlost), Tasma Walton (I am Nannertgarrook), Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies, Ghost Eye), Susan Choi (Flashlight), Trent Dalton (Boy Swallows Universe, Gravity Let Me Go), Mick Herron (Slow Horses) and Suzie Miller (Prima Facie), and “The Future of Democracy - Trump’s America” with Jon Sopel, Nick Bryant and Rosalind Dixon.
Many of the sessions will be set up to enable us to ask questions of the writers, using a phone app. This truly will be a festival of ideas! Schedules of talks are available from the GIL Library Hub.
Books and Blocks
Books and Blocks at the GIL Library Hub gives children the opportunity to use their imagination while developing early mathematical learning skills. During our last session, some learners focused on matching shapes and colours, carefully selecting blocks of the same shape and colour before building their towers. Others explored creative storytelling, constructing elaborate worlds filled with queens, dragons, and castles, with dragons swooping around the castles and kidnapping the queen! Through interactive play, the GIL Library Hub supports early learning and development in a fun and engaging environment. We’d love for you to join us at our next session!
Preschool Craft
The GIL Library Hub welcomed preschoolers and their families to Preschool Craft last week, where creativity was on full display. In celebration of the recent Mother’s Day event, participants enjoyed reading ‘Mummies are Amazing’ before creating a special Mother’s Day craft. Using paper flowers, crepe paper flower appliqués, and heart and flower stickers, the children decorated handprint drawings featuring themselves and their mothers. The finished creations were both colourful and heartfelt, perfect for displaying proudly on the fridge! Preschool Craft will return next month for more creative fun.
DFYM LEGO® Club
What would a librarian do if all the books in the library suddenly ended up in a pile on the floor? Build a robot to help pick them up, of course! Inspired by the new video game ‘Librarian: Tidy up the Arcane Library’, the Designs From Your Mind (DFYM) builders were challenged to create a robot capable of helping a librarian organise, pick up, and reshelve 3072 books.
The results were incredibly inventive; some robots featured crane-like hands, extendable arms, scanners to check the books, motorised brooms for sweeping, and blowers to push books onto the shelves. We can only hope that one day someone will build a real version of these robots to assist us in the library! These amazing creations are now on display in the library, come see them in action!
Tech Club
The Tech Club filmmakers explored another style of filmmaking during the last session: stop-motion animation. Using LEGO®, Stikbot, and Clickbot figures, students began creating their own animated scenes. Stop-motion animation requires filmmakers to take many individual photos, moving the characters only tiny amounts between each shot. When the images are played together as a video, the characters appear to move smoothly. Creating stop-motion videos takes a great deal of patience, careful planning, and precise movements to achieve seamless animation. We will continue developing our stop-motion projects in the next session.
Little STEAM
T is for Technology at Little STEAM, and movie-making is a fun activity that uses lots of technology! At our last Little STEAM session, we used iMovie to create movie trailers based on the book '100 Things I Can Do'. After reading the book and discussing all the amazing things we can do, we recreated scenes from the story and filmed ourselves acting them out! We used a variety of props from the library and explored different background settings to bring our scenes to life. It was a fun and engaging introduction to movie-making for our little learners! Next week, we will continue exploring Technology as we dive into the exciting world of robotics. Learners aged three-to-six and their families are invited to join us for more learning and fun!
Upcoming early learning activities
This week, our second monthly session of Books and Blocks will return, where little imaginations can bring endless adventures to life through play and creativity. Children can build towering creations, send trucks racing through tunnels, or use puppets to play, there’s no limit to what they can imagine! Books and Blocks fosters creativity, problem-solving, and imaginative play in a fun, welcoming environment. Suitable for children aged zero-to-five years.
Storytime will return next week, with lots of song, rhymes and stories for our young learners. In conjunction with National Simultaneous Storytime, we will be reading Luna Roo, the Kangaroo Baller; we can’t wait to read it with all of our friends!
Wiggles and Giggles is an exciting new program for children under six, and is beginning next week at the GIL Library Hub. Join us for a music and movement program, designed for preschoolers and their caregivers. Kids get to build motor skills, practice listening, and connect with their caregivers, all the while having an absolute blast at the library!
Join us every week for Little STEAM at the library, where preschoolers and their families can explore science, technology, engineering, art, and math through hands-on play and discovery! Each session features fun activities, stories, experiments, and creative projects designed especially for young learners. Come build, create, explore, and imagine together in a welcoming space full of curiosity and fun!
Upcoming Adult activities
This week, bring your thinking caps and your fun, competitive spirit along to Friday Puzzles and Games! Enjoy a variety of card and board games, learn something new, and join fellow puzzle-solvers for an engaging and social session. For adults, this is also a wonderful opportunity to connect with others in the community while spending a relaxed and enjoyable morning together.
Riverview Book Club
Next week, Riverview Book Club will gather to discuss “Miss Treadway and The Field of Stars” by Miranda Emmerson. Did you know that we have two book clubs that meet monthly at the library, and that everyone is welcome to join? The library also has a range of book club sets of eight-to-10 copies of a book, that are available to borrow, free of charge.
Tech Savvy Seniors
At Tech Savvy Seniors last week, participants learned the basics of navigating their smart phones or tablets. This week, they will be learning about emails and attachments. Tech Savvy Seniors is free, fun and friendly small group tech training, made possible thanks to funding from Telstra, the NSW Government and the State Library of NSW. If you would like some help with using smartphones or tablets, this program is made for you.
