Açı libraries are an integral part of school culture and enrich students by supporting their educational program and helping them devoloping love and habit of reading books. Açı libraries are student-centered learning areas. With the support of our library teachers, we aim to develop our students’ research skills to promote lifelong habit of learning and reading different genre of books and thus love of reading. In all our libraries, there are various sources to meet the expectations of alll age groups and new ones are added every year.
At our Bahçeköy campus there are 3350 English, 281 Turkish; at our Kemerburgaz campus, there are 1238 English, 136 Turkish; at our Levent campus, there are 6827 English and 850 Turkish; in total 12682 printed materials available.
At the beginning of each academic year, new publications from both domestic and foreign sources are added to our library. Before we start to discuss a new subject, books are chosen from the school libraries to put in our classroom bookcases.
Students borrow books from classroom bookcases every weekend (1 English book for ages 3 and 4, one English book and 1 ORT book for the age of 5)
At Akatlar campus there are 45,900 and at Sarıyer campus there are 44,400 printed and electronic materials. 60% of these materials are in English.
In addition, in our libraries we have various memberships to Turkish and English magazines and we are subscribed to the international resource scan database “EBSCO”. All year round, we keep adding a large number of new publications to our libraries both from local and foreign sources.
Every weekend, students borrow books from the libraries in the scope of their courses, English and Turkish Reading Tree series. In addition, they use the library frequently with their teachers, to select an English and Turkish independent reading book, or to do independent reading in the library, as well doing research for their projects.
The following activities are carried out in the libraries to develop students’ reading habits.
- In the scope of the “Book Week” every year, various library activities, character parade and author interviews
- Throughout the year, there are recess activities in accordance with each class level
- Book club activities within the scope of the students’ own preferences
- Library lessons supporting the curriculum of a course
In our school, a reading hour is performed once every month, across the school,at the same time to help students develop sound reading habits.
In Açı Secondary School Library, there are 25,000 printed and electronic materials. These books are in English, French, Spanish, and Turkish. Furthermore, there are various magazine subscriptions in Turkish, English and French, both print and online versions. We have a subscription of the international resource scan database “Linguascope”. All year round, we keep adding a large number of new publications to our libraries both from local and foreign sources.
The students use the library frequently to select books and do research for their projects and they can utilize the iPads in the library while doing their research.
Açı Secondary School Library every year organizes a Second Hand Book Donation Campaign and supports the “I have a daughter who is going to be a teacher in Anatolia” project of Çağdaş Yaşamı Destekleme Derneği, by donating the funds raised. You can follow the developments in our library and learn more about the activities carried out, from our library blog below.
Açı High School designs the education program based on the following attainments; researching and inquiring students who have 21st century skills, being aware of not only the society they are in, but other cultures as well, growing up as individuals who can be described as a world citizen.
While we are attentive to using technology in the courses for students to capture the digital age, development of the reading habit, which is a part of our school culture, is also supported with great emphasis through both iPads and printed books. Our school uses an iPad-centered education system and our students do most of their reading, especially in Turkish Language and Literature and English courses, through e-books. These readings consist of different genres and books that have the traces of different cultures. Our students present their projects related to their analysis on these works either via iPads or by writing down, as well as enriching their projects with different applications. Furthermore, while our students can reach with their iPads to class novels and elective readings, they also have the opportunity to learn about different types of texts sent to them by their teachers through Google Classroom and ACIS.
Raising Açı High School students as citizens of the world can only be achieved through comprehensive education in every respect. With the awareness of this aspect, to fulfill the requirements of text readings, course contents, topics discussed in the lessons and the related searches, we provide our students with a rich treasury of books; not only on their iPads but also in their classroom libraries. Also, when our students want to read a book or do research about a specific field, they can easily refer to the field specific classroom libraries. A student, who wishes to find a book about literature, can go to the literature classroom; a student who wants to read a book in the field of the history can go to the history classrooms. In this way, knowing where to find what he is looking for, he can focus on the right area and reach the information he’s looking for in a much shorter time.
Apart from the iPads and books in the classroom libraries, there are also monthly literature, science and art magazine subscriptions available in our high school.