My mobility journal
at IC Cadeo e Pontenure

Today, Thursday, we visited the municipal library of Pontenure, called the Villa Raggio Library after the name of an important family who came from Genova and whose holiday home was this building.

The library is open from Monday to Friday n the morning and in the afternoon and it's also opened on Saturday mornings. In the morning people usually come to read newspapers, and on Saturday this public library sometimes organizes special activities for children and for grown-ups. For example, one Saturday each month the library holds a reading group for grown-ups. 

There are also activities for children, who occasionally come to the library as a school trip and sometimes they come with their families. These activities are usually “labs”, celebrated in the  afternoon or on Saturday morning, and  they are focused on different topics, such as learning other languages and cultures (like Chinese).

Besides, there is a national program called “Natti per leggere” (Born to read) in order to promote reading among children, since sometimes within their families children neither have the opportunity to read nor have adults to read aloud for them. This national program, whose origin is in an American program to reduce vandalism among teenagers, is recommended even by pediatricians, since it is very beneficial for children. Thus, in the library, dynamic readings are held to encourage children to love reading.

On the other hand, as for the collaboration between public and school libraries, public libraries may collaborate with school libraries by lending them some books for a school project. Moreover, a few school libraries are also integrated in a regional library network, so they can share their catalogue easily. And, although this is very unusual, Pontenure school library happens to be inside this network, ans so it is Roveleto school library, because Roveleto library works as a school library and as a public library at the same time.

Just to finish talking about the library, I would like to point out that the adult literature section (mostly narrative) is organized by nationalities according to the author’s origin (and, then, each of these sections is also organized alphabetically). But there is no separation  by literary genres.

Later on, after our visit to the public library, we went to Pontenure secondary school to attend a science lesson (taught by Laurence Bellini) with 3rd grade students. In this lesson, students learnt how to extract the DNA of strawberries. And, after a great lunch offered to us by our Italian colleagues, we have seen how "labs" work: there are 11 different types of "labs", that is, workshops, offered to secondary  students of 1st, 2n and 3rd grade: a cooking workshop, a pottery one, a film making worhshop to create short films, a theater one..s  Students can choose two workshops each year (which are every Tuesday or Thursday during two hours), so in total they attend six different workshops when they finish secondary school; and these are classes with mixed levels, that it, in a same group there are pupils from 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade. 

After that, we have spoken to Roberta Cella, the responsible of the school library in Pontenure and she has told us how students can borrow books, which dynamic activities they do in the library and how  they manage to increase the library's catalogue by receiving donations from families (through the national program "Io leggo perchè") and by using the budget assigned by Italian government.

Today, we have attended a short film workshop, a cooking workshop and a pottery workshop. They have all been very interesting, but I prefer the short film workshop, from which I have learned some details that can help improving the film making lessons which we already do at 4th grade at my secondary school and which will help me to design the new workshop for 2nd grade students, focused on creating promotional spots.

Finally, we have met some of our Italian colleagues for dinner, as this was our last night at Roveleto and Pontenure.