The Estevan Public Library celebrates a major change with their children's section of the library. The upgrades to the library have been gone after by Children's Programmer Christine Batke, who has a background in Early Childhood Development. Christine, "We are celebrating the completion of our children's area, I know there have been changes being made for some time now, but it is finally finished. There have been a lot of delays over time, so now its officially finished."

Batke adds all the different areas of focus in the children's area, "We have a variety of different learning environments for the kids, I come from an Early Childhood Education background. So it was very important to me that the area is learning oriented and have different learning opportunities. They have their dramatic play in the kitchen area, so they can play and imagine over there. They have different math and literacy concepts, I brought in a little bookshelf so that it will be themed for when we move in and out of books for our story time. So they have different themed books that they have access to, so they can see the covers without having the parents worry about reshelving. Which is always an issue, when kids pull books off the shelves. We have a variety of different toys for different ages because this area encompasses a very huge broad age range. I think it is why we had trouble setting up the areas because everything you put in here has to be safe for infants as well. Even though you're trying to have stuff for 12-year-olds, it has to be safe for infants."

The new children's program area is a big asset, "I'm really excited, I think its a huge change. And when I went to change it everybody told me that a change this large has been a long time coming and they are really excited about it. It was important for children who might not have access to this vast amount of toys, have a really rich learning environment."

As for the future, Batke had this to say, "Our next move forward is to have toy library in the future, you can take and check out toys. So we're going to be working on that, and hoping to build community partnerships for that. But I would really like to keep it learning based, so if your checking out a tractor there is a rhyme or reason for it. We did partner with Affinity, so we got a grant to help us build it."