Read and play at school: a possible combination to form readers

Abstract

The present work is a description of a method for teaching the reading of Literature to children. More specifically it is the description of the method applied to students with limited reading and writing proficiency from the 3rd and 4th grade of Colégio Marista Champagnat (Saint Marcellin Champagnat School). Such method is part of a research project entitled “Oficinas de Leitura da Literatura Champagnat” linked to the Graduate Program of Letters of PUCRS at work since 2002. The theoretical support that sustains the research is the reading of children’s literature within Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics frame, children’s cognition and ludism. The results obtained through the applied instruments of analysis and the student’s textual productions shown that the method is efficient in terms of the awakening of the child to the pleasure of reading thus constituting an important tool for the formation of readers. Its success is also due to its capacity of being symmetric to the children’s universe; the child is invited to play with the book thus enabling him to have a leisure time as well as to make discoveries not only about himself but his world. The results also show the importance of reading as a way of ensuring the child’s development because they demonstrated that at the moment the child is interested in reading, he become to enhance his quality of life in terms of knowledge and his inner self.