day 2

Today was our second day in Avezzano. We walked to the school and we started the journey with Simona who did a presentation of the school library. Simona is in charge of the school library and is the one who prepares activities and organizes the library.

The library is open to the public every afternoon from 3 to 5 pm. As I explained yesterday, it has a lot of old books and they are mainly for adults. They call the library "Biblioteca Scolastica di quartiere" which means School and Neighborhood Library as it is opened to the public.

The library used to be upstairs but they moved it downstairs so that it could be accessible to everyone in the neighborhood. In 2016 the school initiated a project to improve the library focusing on digitization so that it could be an innovative school library. They collected funds and donations to enrich it.

The library has around 10.000 volumes and works as a public library too as there is only another library which only opens in the morning. What really surprised me is the fact that as a country they don't have public libraries and the government doesn't invest on them. So the school library foments and develops activities in order to bring literature to the population.

After the presentation we had a short break and then we joined an information literacy lab (13 year-old students) which consisted of learning recognizing when and why we need information, where to find it in documents, and how to evaluate and use it to solve problems. Mrs. De Stefano started the lesson by presenting the creative commons system symbols and meanings. Then she asked them to create something by drawing. Once each of the students finished their creations she asked them to decide which of the CC licenses they were going to use for their creations.

After this, she made them pick up a book from the library and see what licenses it had. So then the class had to distinguish and identify the symbols in the books.

The last activity consisted of listening to a reading of a book by the teacher and kids had to listen, Simona was pausing the reading and asking the kids questions related to the story she was telling them. Once the reading was finished they had to invent and write down a few lines to continue with the story.

Today I learned a lot of things about how to manage a school library, even though Simona spoke in Italian all the time I could understand almost everything.

I enjoyed being able to participate in a library and literature class. Simona is the tutor of this group and spends most of her time with them. She teaches them Italian, geography and history. I was surprised that there are many more boys than girls in the group (13 and 7 respectively).

Throughout the session Simona used scaffolding so that her students could understand everything (images, explanations of complicated vocabulary...).

Below you can see a series of images of today's day.