Karori Library

02/09/2026

Cuentacuentos se tomará un receso durante septiembre. No tendremos sesión este sábado, pero volveremos con todo el sábado 3 de octubre: ¡canciones, invitados, historias y juegos! ¡Qué divertido!
Hasta la próxima, amigos. 💃🤩
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Storytime is taking a break during September. We won't have a session this Saturday, but we'll be back on Saturday 3 October with songs, special guests, stories, and games. We can't wait to see you all again!
See you next time, friends! 🎉🥰

01/09/2026

Kia ora e hoa mā, nau mai ki Te Reo Tūrei. Spring has finally sprung! The rā (sun) has come out to play, the weather is warming up and the putiputi (flowers) are beginning to come out to say kia ora! To rāhiri piringa (welcome spring) our kupu o te rā is ‘puāwai'.

As a verb, ‘puāwai' means to bloom and produce flowers; a very fitting kupu as we say haere rā to winter and kia ora to spring! Now is a particularly lovely time to visit Ki Paekākā Wellington City Gardens to see all of the putiputi puāwai 🌸🌷🌼🪻🌹.

28/08/2026

Kia ora Karori friends! The sun is out - come down and join us at Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui Central today with Te Māhanga's own Cuentacuentos presenter Isabel for a vibrant celebration of the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world!

We'll be celebrating with a variety of events around literature, poetry, children's storytelling, youth creative writing, music and dance. ¡Pasa y disfruta! Ven a celebrar la riqueza cultural del mundo hispanohablante con literatura, poesía, cuentacuentos, música y danza. ¡Te esperamos! 🎉💃

You can view the full programme here: https://www.wcl.govt.nz/news/event-spanish-language-celebration-saturday-29-august/

We hope to see you there!

25/08/2026

Nau mai ki te reo Tūrei! This coming Friday is National Poetry Day, so the obvious choice for our kupu o te rā is 'toikupu,' which means poetry. But in fact it's such an obvious choice that we already did it years ago, so today our kupu is 'toi piripiri' which refers to collage art. (It'll make sense in a moment.)

Whereas toikupu is the art (toi) of words (kupu), toi piripiri is the art of things getting stuck together.

This week libraries around Wellington are running youth Found Poetry Workshops to celebrate National Poetry Day. If you come along you'll cutting, gluing, and blacking out words to transform old documents into new poems. Ta-dah! Toikupu and toi piripiri at the same time!

Check out the story on our website for more information.

New Zealand National Poetry Day 2026 is on Friday 28 August. To celebrate, join us for a Youth Found Poetry Workshop!

18/08/2026

Kia ora e hoa mā, nau mai ki Te Reo Tūrei! This week is New Zealand Children's Book Week which gives us an excuse (not that we need one!) to celebrate and explore all the exciting books coming out for Aotearoa for our young people.

Our kupu o te rā is 'Puka Whakaahua' which means picture book. You might recognize 'puka' from 'pukapuka' meaning book and 'whakaahua' refers to images like illustrations, photographs, portrait etc.

We have lots of gorgeous puka whakaahua from New Zealand authors and illustrators in our libraries. These pukapuka are identifiable by the koru sticker on their spine 😊 Here are some of our favourites we have here at Karori!

14/08/2026

Join us at 11am on Monday for the NZ Book Week Read-Along!

This isn’t like our usual storytime – instead, we will be playing a video of the author, the illustrator and a translator as they read their fantastic book Dazzlehands🐽. You will be joining people all around the country, all reading this book📖 at the same time. So if you’d like to experience this fun literary event in your local library, come on down! We’ll have a copy of the book and lots of bookish activities to do afterwards.

You can read more about it here:

NZ Children's Book Week: National Read Along • Read NZ Te Pou Muramura

08/08/2026

Hola! Save the date in your diaries for a special celebration of the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world! Hosted at Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui Central Library on Saturday 29 August (with Te Mahanga Karori's wonderful own Cuentacuentos presenter Isabel). See you there! 💃🏾🎉

Join us at Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui Central on Saturday 29 August for a vibrant celebration of the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world! We'll be celebrating with a variety of events around literature, poetry, children's storytelling, youth creative writing, music and dance. ¡Pasa y disfruta! Ven a celebrar la riqueza cultural del mundo hispanohablante con literatura, poesía, cuentacuentos, música y danza. ¡Te esperamos!
Full programme of events: https://tinyurl.com/muaw4btw

04/08/2026

Nau mai ki te reo Tūrei! Here in Te Whanganui-a-Tara snow is not something you see every day, so of course our kupu o te rā has to be 'huka'.

Huka refers to snow, as well as other kinds of white precipitation like frost, hail, or even foam. It often gets combined with other words to give a more specific meaning. For example, 'tarahī huka' means light snow that melts as it falls, like what we've seen at Te Māhanga today.

'Huka' is also used as a transliteration of the English word 'sugar'. The similarity between snow and sugar is a coincidence, but it does make the transliteration a bit more poetic!

01/08/2026

Kids, teens, we want your poems about Taiao | Nature! The submission date for Tūhono 2026 has been extended until Sunday 9 August so there's still time to write and enter your poem. The fabulous thing about Tūhono, Wellington City Libraries' poetry journal for tamariki and rangatahi, is that entry is not a competition, all work received that meets the rules of submission will be published. You can read more about Tūhono here:
🍃 https://www.wcl.govt.nz/collections/special-collections/tuhono/

At Karori Library we also have a special poetry event for young people coming up. In celebration of Aotearoa's National Poetry Day on Friday 28 August, we will be hosting a Found Poetry Workshop for Young People, 3:30-4:30pm. We want to show you that if you get crafty, anyone can be a poet. This event is for young people aged 9-14, and you can read more about the session here:
📖 https://www.facebook.com/share/196KhkN6Rz/

Nau mai rā tātou katoa | Everybody is welcome.