Waldinger heads out of this world for Apollo

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More than 20 children and their parents gathered at the Henry Waldinger Memorial Library Children’s Room on July 20 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

“It went really well,” said Children’s Librarian Jaclyn Kunz.

She said that the party began with her reading to children a story about someone who worked on Apollo 11, then the children were able to play solar system BINGO and break out into teams to find moon rocks hidden within the room. The children then went to different stations where they could participate in a variety of activities, including making space-themed pictures, taking space-inspired photos and watching the footage of Apollo 11 landing on the moon on July 20, 1969.

“I thought it was really fun to expose them to something they don’t have a memory of, but the adults around them do,” Kunz said.

Apollo 11 took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fl. On July 16, and touched down along the moon’s Sea of Tranquility on July 20. Neil Armstrong then stepped out of the lunar module to utter the famous words, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” before he and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin planted an American flag on the moon. The astronauts returned to Earth on July 24.