“In my days, it wasn’t like that.”
Many families seek us out to talk about the literacy process and begin their inquiries with this sentence.
Before, those who signed their own name were considered to be literate. However, recognizing letters and knowing how to join syllables alone is not enough.
Knowing the letters does not guarantee the formation of an effective reader and an author of his own texts.
Being literate is knowing how to use reading and writing according to social demands. Literacy makes the individual capable of organizing discourses, interpreting and understanding texts and reflecting on them.
What defines quality literacy today? What guarantees the formation of critical readers and authors of their own texts?
Today we have references and research that prove the ineffectiveness of some literacy methods. Traditional methods, in general, do not consider reading and writing as cultural practices.
Reading and writing are understood as decoding and encoding processes, in which children learn to deal with language units (phonemes, letters, syllables, single words). But they can barely read, produce meaning, and write authorial, creative texts, with syntactic structure, rich in vocabulary and in the discursive dimension.
At Infanzia, we are clear that literacy is communication. We teach children to write conventionally without the need to resort to teaching isolated letters, syllables and phonemes.
As Goulart (2014) warns us, literacy based on texts is strengthened with the possibility for students to delve into the meanings of the texts they read and invent new meanings for the texts they write.
With a generation with an excess of images – photographs, videos, screens – reading and writing, in a pleasurable and meaningful way, becomes necessary and urgent every day. When you start writing, you don’t start writing thinking about the letters, you start writing thinking about the meaning you are going to give.
It is important to look at children as readers and text producers, even before the 1st year of Elementary School. Look at them from the perspective of what they already are and the potential they have.
Readers and producers of texts not only in verbal, oral and written language, but in other forms of expression, such as painting, sculpture, cinema, theater, music, dance, among other historical and cultural languages.
Reading and writing is daily practice. Living with writing and reading in daily movements adds interest, importance and development to the process itself.
A literacy environment – one where there is a literate culture, with books, digital or paper texts, a world of writings that circulate socially, becomes a third educator. The environments, as well as the didactic materials, are fundamental in the literacy process.
As Ferreira (2002) confirms, based on the possibilities offered by the environments, as long as they are planned by equally powerful and attentive educators, the closer the children will be to the resources contained therein and, consequently, the voluntary development of practices and experiences that show and promote literacy.
A school concerned with the pragmatism of immediate results denies the subjects’ learning processes, their histories and experiences. Fails to notice the intelligence of children and their complex thoughts.
For this reason, from an early age, children at Infanzia are encouraged to argue, create collective texts, manipulate and identify literary books, carry out readings of the world that surrounds and constitutes them.
They write collective and individual texts, create stories that become books and theatrical plays. They learn that they can and should write their own narratives.
In this year, 2023, in the international exam called Pirls (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), Brazil occupied the 39th position among 43 countries in the assessment of reading and writing skills of children aged 9 to 10 years. Literacy, in the 21st century, is still an emergency in our country.