LIBRARY A MAGIC PLACE
ONE PERSON ONE BOOK
Each book contributes, in some way, to make each of us a better person, to change a part of us, to change the way of understanding life and living it. This has always been for us, teachers of the school "De Cillis" in Rosolini, a certitude.
We believe that reading books is an act of love, an activity through which we take care of our students. It is a way to feed the need of knowledge, to excite, to arouse curiosity and provoke questions, to challenge certainties, ways of thinking and seeing things. One way to introduce our children to another world, a world that gradually comes alive in the pages of a book.
However, in the last few years, we have realized that every day life has been changing, with more and more frenetic pace, and reading books has gradually left behind, up almost to disappear. We think that this is one of the biggest mistakes of the present society, because a book is a source of enrichment not only cultural, but intellectual, social, ethical and moral, too.
So the beginning of the project "Library A Magic Place" has been for our school the opportunity to brush up on reading involvement that we, as teachers, have always sought to pursue. We have tried to find strategies to increasingly involve our students from kindergarten to secondary school.
Indeed years in kindergarten are dense of narratives, stories, semantic and fantastic plots; plots interwoven into different cultures, ways of life, diversity and sensibility.
Books help children to understand what's happening inside and around them, allow them to create common spaces of experience, of knowledge, of sharing, of inclusion and integration; they offer high educational value encounters that are well matched to emotions, desires, personal needs, the desire to learn and to understand, the ability to invent, fantasize, create, liberty to express and think.
But to attract contemporary children it is important the organizational level, to prepare the environment and taking care of the disposition of the children in order to prepare them positively to allow them to immerse themselves in the activity of listening.
It’s important to create a magical atmosphere by using music, images, sound effects… And that’s what we try to do with our youngest students day by day!
One of the things we have tried to do, especially in Primary School, has been to understand our students’ interests and use them to convey the beauty of reading. So we have started to use e-readers. Technology is a great way to involve pupils, who are nowadays more and more technologized.
Completely in opposition, compared to the use of technology, we have proposed to some students in Primary School, an activity of reading with the use of Kamishibai.
Kamishibai is a form of Japanese street theatre and storytelling. It was told by a kamishibaiya (kamishibai narrator) who used to travel from town to town with sets of illustrated boards that he or she placed in a miniature stage-like device and narrated the story by changing images. So Kamishibai stories consist of beautifully illustrated cards. In fact it is also known as “paper drama�.
After listening to some stories, students worked in groups and, with the help of the teacher, they created their own pictures.
So those stories were carefully prepared, illustrated and then narrated to other students and parents.
As regards secondary School, they have been planned and implemented a series of activities to promote, consolidate, strengthen and develop the love for reading. The motivations were focused on emotional experience, by which reading, by a mechanical fact, has become a fun game, creative and engaging.
So, starting from a joking, but not much, provocation made by Professor Francesco Sabatini, honorary president of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Academy della Cruscaâ&#x20AC;?, who jokingly threw the idea to rewrite the Italian Constitution by adding a new article: << All Italian citizens have the right and duty to know by heart at least a triplet of Dante .... because without Dante we would not be who we are >>. This challenge was accepted by one of our teachers who created the laboratory activities: "Reading Dante today."
The activities of this laboratory culminated with the Participation to the national Competition "Le cime di Dante", sixth edition, a cultural prize reserved to students of all schools at all levels, which ended with the certificate of merit for one of our students.
The learners involved, have diligently acted various verses from the "Commedia" which Boccaccio called Divine for its beauty and uniqueness, reviving, with simplicity, the various characters, from Beatrice to Paolo and Francesca, from Count Ugolino to Ulysses, from Virgil to Dante himself.
Thanks to this Erasmus+ project we reorganized the school library. We worked to digitalize it. We started by reviewing the list of books and computerizing it in order to facilitate the consultation.
We also restored some of the old books we had in our library, books that are historical heritage not only for our school but for the whole city. This work has been really important as allow us to pass them to the future generations.
Some of our students working in restoring books
We also fitted out a reading room. It has been decorated by a group of students of Secondary School. The intention is to use it in order to organize animated readings in an unconventional way and to create a place where every child can feel comfortable to free in his/her imagination.
work in progress for the decoration of the new reading room
In conclusion we can say that this project has been for us a way to reevaluate the activity of reading, to reapropriate the books and the beauty of having one in your hands and always close at hand. Much has been done and much remains to be done. Our personal commitment is to continue on this path.
Referenti progetto: ARANGIO SARA GIORGIO FIGURA
Dirigente Scolastico: GIOVANNI DI LORENZO