While out on a walk along the Elmwood Park walking path or while playing at Riverside Park residents may have noticed an inventive new program started by the local library.

Tekeyla Friday, Children's Programmer for the Chinook Regional Library provides details on the Story Trails program.

"The story trails is a children's picture book that is printed page by page and put on coroplast which is plastic advertising type poster board and they are put on stakes and we stake them into the ground in a natural setting such as Elmwood Park or Riverside Park."

Kids who participate by going along and reading the story, there is a quiz they can fill out on the first stake and drop it off at the Swift Current branch library or their local library if they find a story trail in one of the other branches and they can enter to win a prize. 

Friday details why the program was implemented.

"With COVID and restrictions on programming due to the virus,  we had to come up with a way to do summer programs without having large crowds gathering and to be able to implement some type of reading club programming."

The story trail program uses some of the TD recommended reads which are the books seen around the community. 

Friday says that they had so much interest the first week of the program that they had to reach out to the city and ask permission to post the program for another three weeks. She says they have been receiving quizzes back and plans to do some draws next week. 

The current story trails will be in place until Aug 6th and then new ones will be put in place from August 20th-24th.

Friday says they will certainly try the program again next summer and possibly throughout the winter as well.