These locations have theatres available for rental：

*Fairview               *Palmerston            *York Woods

Each June, theatre booking requests for dates in the following calendar year (January to December) are accepted. For more information, call the Room Booking Unit at 416-397-5969.

For people who didn't make a booking request in June, call the Room Booking Unit at 416-397-5969 to check for remaining dates.

Once the library receives a request, staff will check the availability and place a tentative booking for you. You will then receive a contract that you must return with payment within 10 calendar days of the tentative booking and with a minimum of two months before the first booking to confirm the booking.

Payment for the first booking and any bookings in the current month is due when you return the signed contract. If you have booked for multiple months, payments for those months are due at the beginning of each month.

In bringing up children, every parent watches eagerly the child’s acquisition (学会) of each new skill—— the first spoken words, the first independent steps, or the beginning of reading and writing. It is often tempting to hurry the child beyond his natural learning rate, but this can set up dangerous feelings of failure and states of worry in the child. This might happen at any stage. A baby might be firced to use a toilet too early. A young child might be encouraged to learn to read before he knows the meaning of the words he reads. On the other hand, though, if a child is left alone too much, or without any learning opportunities, he loses his natural enthusiasm for life and his desire to find out new things for himself.

Parents vary greatly in their degree of strictness towards their children. Some may be especially strict in money matters. Others are severe over time of coming home at night or punctuality for meals. In general, the controls represent the needs of the parents and the values of the community as much as the child’s own happiness.

As regards the development of moral standards in the growing child, consistency (一致性）is very important in parental teaching. To forbid a thing one day and excuse it the next is no foundation for morality. Also, parents should realize that “example is better than precept”. If they are not sincere and do not practice what they say, their children may grow confused and emotionally insecure when they grow old enough to think for themselves, and realize they have been to some extent fooled.

A sudden awareness of an obvious difference between their parents’ principles and their morals can be a dangerous disappointment.

Once, African lions were the kings of the jungle. But every day, they lose more and more of their home to humans. A new study done by Duke University shows that humans have taken over much of the lions habitat.

Lions live on the African plains, which are called savannas. In the past 5 years, the number of people living on the Savannas African plains has grown rapidly. At the same time, the number of lions has dwindled quickly.

The research team at Duke University used detailed pictures taken by satellite to carefully examine the African landscape. They were able to see very small farms and towns that are taking over the once-open plains. Lions need wide-open spaces to hunt. As the number of people and towns has increased, the African plains have become less welcoming to lions. The number of lions has dropped from about 100, 000 in 1960 to 32,000 today. West Africa has seen the largest drop ——fewer than 500 lions remain there.

Researchers worry that the number of lions will decrease even more as the number of humans moving onto the savannas increases. People and lions living closely together have to compete for natural resources like water and food. Towns and farms that take over hunting grounds could force the lions out of those areas completely. Often, lions with no other sources of food will kill farm animals. Farmers will then kill the lions to protect their animals. African lions are also threatened by poachers, who hunt animals illegally. Many poachers hunt lions for sport or to take their fur.

One of the authors of the Duke University study is conservationist Stuart Pimm. Pimm believes the group’s research can be helpful in planning ways for people and lions to share the African plains. One solution is to build higher fences to keep lions away from farm animals. African countries can also expand and better protect their wildlife reserves so that lions have safe places to hunt.

Sign has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have specialists in language study realized that signed languages are unique—a speech of the hand. They offer a new way to explore how the brain generates and understands language, and throw new light on an old scientific controversy: whether language, complete with grammar, is something that we are born with, or whether it is a learned behavior. The current interest in sign language has roots in the pioneering work of a teacher at Gallaudet University in Washington, D. C., the world’s only liberal arts university for deaf people.

When Bill Stokoe went to Gallaudet to teach English, the school enrolled him in a course in signing. But Stokoe noticed something strange: among themselves, students signed differently from his classroom teacher.

Stokoe had been taught a sort of gestural code, each movement of the hands representing a word in English. At the time, American Sign Language (ASL) was thought to be no more than a form of pidgin English (混杂英语). But Stokoe believed the“hand talk”his students used looked richer. He wondered: Might deaf people actually have a genuine language? And could that language be unlike any other on Earth? It was 1955, when even deaf people considered their signing as “substandard”. Stokoe’s idea was academic heresy (异端邪说).

It is 37 years later. Stokoe—now devoting his time to writing and editing books and journals and to producing video materials on ASL and the deaf culture—is having lunch at a cafe near the Gallaudet campus and explaining how he started a revolution. For decades, educators fought against his idea that signed languages are natural languages like English, French and Japanese. They assumed language must be based on speech, the modulation (调节) of sound. But sign language is based on the movement of hands, the modulation of space. “What I said,” Stokoe explains, “is that language is not mouth stuff—it’s brain stuff.”