[…] everything is just one Literature. The difficulty lies in delimiting what is considered especially in the children’s sphere. It is the children, in fact, who define it, with their preferences. It is customary to classify what is written for children as Children’s Literature. Perhaps it would be more accurate to classify what they read as useful and pleasurable. There would therefore not be Children’s Literature a priori, but a posteriori.
Cecília Meireles
In a recent survey released by Iede (Center for Research in Education, Interdisciplinarity and Evidence) 66.3% of Brazilian students aged 15 to 16 do not read texts longer than ten pages. According to the research, only 9.5% of Brazilian students read material longer than 100 pages. In Finland, a country that has the best study rates in the world, the percentage reaches 72.8%.
These data show a sad reality in our country and the importance of working with literature from the first years of schooling.
At Infanzia, reader training is encouraged from nursery.
As Walter Benjamin teaches us, children’s reading includes seeing, appreciating, imagining, feeling and also seeing, appreciating, imagining and feeling again. Start over again from the beginning, recreating what you experienced with each reading.
One of the pillars of our work is literature. Literature that provokes children – in the formation of language and criticality. As subjects of language and in language we live in a world marked by images, sounds, speech, movements, writing. As Bakhtin announces, we do not acquire a language, but we penetrate the enunciative flow. The symbolic world of culture constantly enunciates and impels us to interpret it, to respond to it with our possibilities of understanding. The symbolic world surrounds us and challenges us.
We live immersed in an intense and continuous discursive process typical of symbolic existence and, among so many discourses that circulate and participate in human activities, we defend literature, from the first months of life, as a possibility of entry into this symbolic world and all the expansions that This entry causes changes in the lives of the subjects.
That’s why, in our second semester, we have a project – for years – based on literature, Infanzia Narra. Each class chooses a theme, an author or a literary genre to investigate, create and write stories. In our closings this year, we introduce families to different ways of telling a story. Shadows, boxes, photographs, puppets, theater, light, sounds… different means and supports to transport us to contexts that move us.
In our reading room, every year, we renew the collection. The books are chosen based on some quality criteria. In addition to working with literature every day in the classroom, every fortnight the children in early childhood education choose the books to take home, inviting families to read as well. In Elementary School, books are taken weekly.
In the record of one of the mothers in the 1st year, she congratulates her enchantment with our choices:
I want to record that I am delighted with the books that the school chose for this year’s festival. Books that cover different subjects, from mourning to funny everyday situations that allow us to experience everything from tears to laughter. I realize that they were carefully chosen, as they stimulate quality interpretation…
Children’s literature for children can be a space for training and freedom, for displacements and expansions, for sensitivity and humanization. All of this that gives more meaning and consistency to existence.
The right to literature is guaranteed in Infanzia.