National Family Day (September 26) celebrates families of all types, backgrounds, and sizes. For this day, focus on the people who make your life meaningful! For anyone looking to spend quality time with their family, CGPL has a diverse collection of activities for checkout. These items can be checked out by an adult with a CGPL or Riverside Regional library card. Happy National Family Day!
One of the best things about CGPL is our Library of Things, which allows library cardholders to borrow a variety of items that are conducive to a spectacular Family Day. For example, you and the kids might choose to start a rock band: check out our ukulele, acoustic guitar, electric keyboard and stand, and wooden instrument set!
Or take advantage of Cape’s crisp fall weather and beautiful public parks by borrowing one of our outdoor game sets: we have horseshoes, croquet, and disc golf, just to name a few. You might also bring along a nature backpack for another fun (and educational!) outdoor activity. And don’t forget about our fishing rods!
Autumn does bring us some gloomy, rainy days of course: in this instance, encourage your young budding scientists to try one of our STEM kits! Learn about electronics, coding, and bots in this one, or explore science through the lens of Marvel superheroes in our Everyday Science kit. These are great activities for families to learn together.
If your family’s favorite group activity involves making tasty treats, we have something for you, too! Browse our selection of baking pans and cookie cutters, or even try out our canning set or our ice cream maker. The sweetest (or most dangerous!) option, though, might be our chocolate fountain. Utilize any number of these culinary options to open your own (private) family eatery.
Come to Youth Services and choose a board or card game; our shelves are even organized by recommended age level. Adult Services also has great selections for kids at heart. A few of our favorite selections include:
Feed the Woozle encourages kids to work together and feed the Woozle so he won't be hungry!
Gnomes at Night is a cooperative search-and-find maze game where players work as a team to maneuver the magnetic gnome movers around the maze. Work together in this quick-thinking communication game where every second counts!
Nice Buns is a light strategy game in which players sit together in the "Nice Buns Buffet" and race to fill up their plate with three sets of colorful bao buns. Each round, you roll three dice to collect, steal, and trade different buns.
However, there's a twist! Before you do anything, the player on your left will get to decide which dice you can use...and which ones they'll keep for themselves.
Wingspan is a competitive, medium-weight, card-driven, engine-building board game! You are bird enthusiasts—researchers, bird watchers, ornithologists, and collectors—seeking to discover and attract the best birds to your network of wildlife preserves. Each bird extends a chain of powerful combinations in one of your habitats (actions). These habitats focus on several key aspects of growth:
The object is to remove one block at a time from the tower. Read and answer the question aloud that appears on the block and then stack it on top. The last player to stack a block without making the tower fall wins the game. The most avid reader assembles the tower and then goes first. Play passes to the left. On your turn, carefully remove one block from anywhere below the highest completed story of the tower. Use only one hand. Then, stack the block on top of the tower at right angles to the blocks just below it. As the block is removed, read the question on it out loud. Answer the question and let the conversation flow as you stack the block on top of the tower. You can touch blocks to find a loose one, but if you move a block out of place, you must put it back in place using one hand only before touching another block. While stacking, always complete a 3-block story before starting a higher one. Your turn ends 10 seconds after you stack your block or as soon as the next player touches one.
In CATAN (formerly The Settlers of Catan), players try to be the dominant force on the island of Catan by building settlements, cities, and roads. On each turn, dice are rolled to determine what resources the island produces. Players build by spending resources (sheep, wheat, wood, brick, and ore) that are depicted by these resource cards; each land type, with the exception of the unproductive desert, produces a specific resource: hills produce brick, forests produce wood, mountains produce ore, fields produce wheat, and pastures produce sheep.
First, divide everyone into two teams. On your team's turn, one member attempts to give clues to 10 words. The cards state its "buzzword". Other team members must solve each clue by saying the phrases that include the buzzword. Meanwhile, the other team keeps track of the time and the missed clues. Score one point for each correctly solved clue. The clue giver reads the missed clues to the other team, giving them a chance to score. The first team to reach 50 points wins. Watch out! You only get 45 seconds to complete your answers to questions ranging from easy to quite difficult.