Places & Spaces: Pincher Creek Municipal Library

This summer, a missing animal is waiting to be found in Prince Edward Island, then Hawaii, Australia, Bali and the Caribbean, and Pincher Creek children are travelling the world, one week at a time, to bring each one home.

It’s Pincher Creek Municipal Library’s own globetrotting spin on the 2026 TD Summer Reading Club, and outreach co-ordinator Samantha Bonwick builds a fresh adventure around the national theme every year.

Running July 7 to Aug. 12, the six-week program embraces this year’s national Dive In theme, which encourages children to explore waterways and aquatic life.

The TD program supplies libraries across Canada with activity books and resources, but Bonwick creates her own story around the national theme.

“We are going to a different location in the world to find that a certain species has disappeared,” she says.

“We learn about that animal and learn about what happens to that environment without that animal, and how important that animal was to the environment.”

Each week, participants travel to a different destination, beginning in Prince Edward Island and ending back home in Pincher Creek to learn about rainbow trout.

Along the way, children complete themed crafts and activities and search for the week’s missing animal. Once it’s found, they place a sticker on a habitat display, symbolically returning the species to its natural environment.

The library offers three age-based sessions:

—Ages zero to four: Wednesdays, 10:30 to 11:30 a.m.

—Ages five to seven (kindergarten to Grade 2): Tuesdays, 10:30 a.m. to noon.

—Ages eight to 11 (grades 3 to 5): Wednesdays, 1:30 to 3 p.m.

Weekly Funday Fridays are also held on the library lawn and are open to families on a drop-in basis.

Bonwick enjoys taking the annual theme and turning it into an imaginative adventure that makes learning feel less like schoolwork.

Among past adventures was chasing Bigfoot across Canada during the country’s 150th anniversary celebrations.

“There was a learning aspect and a reading aspect to it, but we do it in an adventure,” she says. “It’s in a fun way because I want them to still get it somewhere and not have to come here and do worksheets and school.”

Participants receive TD Summer Reading Club activity books to record everything they read throughout the summer, whether it’s a chapter from a novel, a recipe or anything else.

Children earn weekly prizes for tracking their reading and every completed title helps build an aquatic-themed mural on the library’s program-room window.

During each session, Bonwick also reads a picture book connected to that week’s featured destination or animal.

She hopes the club introduces new families to the library and helps children develop a lifelong appreciation for reading.

“I really love that I’ve seen kids who I’ve never met before come for the Summer Reading Club, and then I get to see them continue using the library that following year,” she says.

“I really love meeting new faces and trying to help foster that love for the library and for reading.”

The main goal is simply to keep children reading through the summer, and that doesn’t need to mean “sitting down and reading a long chapter book,” Bonwick says.

“Reading can be reading a magazine. Reading can be following a recipe. Reading can be pointing out traffic signs as you’re driving. Reading doesn’t have to be ‘Sit down, be quiet and read.’ Reading can be fun.”