The PNLD 2022 and the literacy curricularization in early childhood education

ABSTRACT

This article presents research that aimed to analyze the literacy proposals of two textbook collections approved in the PNLD 2022 regarding appropriation of alphabetic writing. As methodological procedures, a documental analysis of volumes 1 and 2 of the Porta Aberta and Bambolê books for children aged 4 and 5, respectively, was carried out. These book collections were the most chosen by Early Childhood Education teachers from public schools in some cities in the state of Pernambuco. Data analysis indicated that both collections, complying with the requirements of the PNLD 2022 public notice, propose work focused on preparing children for literacy with a focus on motor coordination exercises, auditory and visual discrimination and the explicit teaching of relations between the letters of the alphabet and their corresponding sounds. The proposals for teaching reading and writing presented in the analyzed collections contradict what is presented in the DCNEI and BNCC for the Early Childhood Education stage, since they do not prioritize interactions and play, and do not guarantee, in working with children, their basic rights.

Keywords:
Literacy; Curriculum; Textbook; Early Childhood Education

RESUMO

Este artigo apresenta uma pesquisa que teve como objetivo analisar as propostas de alfabetização de duas coleções aprovadas no PNLD 2022 no que se refere ao trabalho no eixo da apropriação da escrita alfabética. Como procedimentos metodológicos, realizou-se análise documental dos volumes 1 e 2 das coleções Porta Aberta e Bambolê, voltadas para crianças de 4 e 5 anos respectivamente. Essas coleções foram as mais escolhidas por professores de Educação Infantil de redes públicas de ensino de algumas cidades do estado de Pernambuco. A análise dos dados indicou que ambas as coleções, cumprindo com as exigências do Edital do PNLD 2022, propõem um trabalho voltado para a preparação das crianças para a alfabetização com foco em exercícios de coordenação motora e discriminação auditiva e visual e no ensino explícito das relações entre as letras do alfabeto e seus correspondentes sons. As propostas de ensino da leitura e da escrita presentes nas coleções analisadas contrariam o que está presente nas DCNEI e na BNCC para a etapa da Educação Infantil, uma vez que não priorizam as interações e a brincadeira, e não asseguram, no trabalho com as crianças, direitos básicos destas.

Palavras-chave:
Alfabetização; Currículo; Livro Didático; Educação Infantil

Introduction

Talking about literacy in early childhood education in our country is both controversial and necessary. Unfortunately, in the 21^st century, there is still a significant number of children who complete the literacy acquisition cycle and progress through school without actually mastering reading and writing. Questions involving when and how our children should start the literacy acquisition process have been answered in different ways. These include the role of Early Childhood Education in this process and the use of different types of materials, such as textbooks.

In the 1970s, the high rate of school failure among children attending our country’s public schools occurred mainly due to the high number of students who were unable to become literate in their first year of school and ended up failing and dropping out. Traditional literacy methods were used to teach reading and writing - synthetic (alphabetic, syllabic or phonic) and analytical. The blame for this failure fell mainly on the children, who were seen as having cultural needs, linguistic deficiencies, and emotional gaps.

In this context, as discussed by Kramer (2006), educational policies aimed at teaching children from 0 to 6 years of age began to advocate for compensatory education in order to reduce the high rates of school failure and dropout in the first grade of elementary school. Preschool should, therefore, prepare children for literacy. How would this preparation take place?

Literacy development based on analytical or synthetic methods required children to be ready to develop perceptual and motor skills. Thus, language work in preschool - the stage before formal schooling - had to have activities that led children to develop motor coordination and auditory and visual discrimination, activities that included, among other skills, identifying and tracing isolated letters and syllables.

For Brandão and Leal (2010, p. 16), this way of working with language in Early Childhood Education is related to a path known as “literacy obligation”, according to which the years leading up to Primary School should prepare students for literacy acquisition. For this to happen, emphasis is placed on developing perceptual and motor skills. Children are expected to finish Kindergarten “mastering certain graphophonic cues, copying letters, words and small texts, as well as reading and writing some words and sentences” (BRANDÃO; LEAL, 2010, p. 16) so that, in the first year of Primary School, they can start working on literacy itself, based on synthetic or analytical methods of teaching reading and writing.

In contrast to this path¹, the authors point to a second one, entitled “literacy without letters”, which proposes that work in Early Childhood Education should involve other forms of language (such as body language, music, and graphics). There would be no space for writing, since the idea is to reject any proposal that involves writing as “school content”, as proposed in Path 1. In this second path, as Morais, Albuquerque and Brandão (2016) point out, it is possible to adopt a position known as “drifting”, in which the adult observes the children’s need to express themselves and only responds to their curiosity when asked about how to write a particular word or letter. As a result, writing initiatives and reflections about it happen spontaneously and come exclusively from the children themselves, without any planning on the part of the teacher when it comes to developing writing activities.

As an alternative to these two paths, the authors suggest a third one, called “Reading and writing meaningfully in Early Childhood Education”, based on the theory of the Psychogenesis of Writing (Ferreiro; Teberosky, 1984) and on studies about literacy. According to this approach, working with written language in Early Childhood Education would not only include activities that lead children to assimilate the alphabetic writing system through playful and reflective activities, but also diversified reading and writing situations that would ensure the expansion of their literacy experiences. We stand by this approach and agree with Brandão and Leal (2010) and Morais (2012) when they argue that children in Early Childhood Education can learn some principles of the alphabetic system from a ludic perspective, taking into consideration childhood and its peculiarities.

Amid this lack of consensus on how to work with reading and writing in Early Childhood Education, we have witnessed an increasing number of handouts and textbooks in this stage of education in public schools, as shown in the research by Silva (2019) and Araujo and Silva (2021). According to Brandão and Silva (2017, p. 441), “whether or not to adopt textbooks in Early Childhood Education is, however, a topic that requires careful reflection on the part of teachers, school managers and public policy makers.” The authors point out that, for some people, the use of a textbook would guarantee a certain uniformity regarding the content taught, giving teachers with little experience greater confidence, as the book includes activities and themes for the teacher’s work. Supporting families and reducing parents’ anxiety would be other reasons for recommending the use of textbooks in early childhood education. It is also claimed, however, that such use would lower the possibility of dealing with themes in a contextualized way (connected to the interests of the group of students) and would also diminish the teacher’s autonomy by making experiences poor and standardized, thus restricting other essential aspects of child development.

Given so many controversies in the field, the publication, in 2020, of the notice for the 2022 National Book and Teaching Material Program (Programa Nacional do Livro e do Material Didático - PNLD) made us realize the imposition of didactic and pedagogical changes related to the work on reading and writing in Early Childhood Education. From a didactic point of view, the announcement, aligned with the National Literacy Policy (Política Nacional de Alfabetização - PNA), proposes that Early Childhood Education should be a preparatory stage for the acquisition of reading and writing skills, with the teaching of coding and decoding and a focus on phonics instruction. From a pedagogical point of view, it implemented the use of textbooks by pre-school children (4 and 5 years old), which, despite present in many public and private schools, were not adopted nationwide.

The distribution and adoption of textbooks with the profile demanded by the PNLD 2022 Notice contradicts the National Common Curriculum Base (Base Nacional Comum Curricular - BNCC) guidelines, as well as the curricula of different Education Departments. In this context, our research sought to analyze the literacy proposals in textbooks approved in the PNLD 2022, in order to understand how they guide the work with reading and writing in the daily school routine of the classes in the last two years of Early Childhood Education. As to our specific objectives, we sought to: (1) identify the theoretical-methodological assumptions underpinning the textbooks analyzed; (2) characterize the text collection present in them in order to understand how it contributes to the appropriation of alphabetic writing and literacy; (3) understand the nature and characterization of the activities aimed at appropriating the Alphabetic Writing System (Sistema de Escrita Alfabética - SEA); and (4) understand the influence of the National Common Curriculum Base (BNCC) and the National Literacy Policy (PNA) on the production of the literacy proposals in the books analyzed.

Next, we will turn our attention to the prescribed curriculum. The reason for that is that we intend to understand how the national curriculum guidelines approach the work with written language in Early Childhood Education.

Curriculum guidelines for Early Childhood Education and working with reading and writing

According to Arroyo (2013), concerns about the Early Childhood Education curriculum in Brazil are recent, and this has been identified as one of the areas in which progress has been slowest. Only after the National Education Guidelines and Bases Law (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional - LDBEN) n. 9.394/96 (Brasil, 1996) did a systematizing milestone emerge, since it defined both the need for a national curriculum and the purpose of this stage of education. Article 29 (amended by 12.796/2013) states that “early childhood education, the first stage of basic education, aims at the full development of children up to 5 (five) years of age, in their physical, psychological, intellectual and social aspects, complementing the actions of the family and the community” (Brazil, 2023).

In order to achieve this holistic development, childcare should involve a variety of aspects, such as caring for one’s body, health, nutrition, and affectivity through building bonds and cognitive aspects, in which different types of knowledge are provided in an articulated manner, all in accordance with each child’s age group. Faria e Sales (2012, p. 32) understands the curriculum in Early Childhood Education as:

a set of cultural experiences of care and education related to knowledge, intentionally selected and organized by the professionals at an IEI, to be experienced by the children, with a view to their human education. It is one of the elements of the Pedagogical Proposal and must be guided by the assumptions that guide it and articulated with the other elements defined in it.

Thus, the curriculum is seen as a set of selected experiences aimed at human education. In the current Brazilian political context, in which education is going through troubled times, what has been prescribed for teaching written language at this stage of education? Are the documents guiding the curriculum aligned or do they diverge?

The National Curriculum Guidelines for Early Childhood Education (Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para Educação Infantil - DCNEI), established in 2009 by Resolution 05/2009, guarantees the attendance of children aged 4 and 5 and guides schools’ pedagogical proposals to place the child at the center of the pedagogical planning, respecting ethical, political and aesthetic principles to ensure their right to singularities, cultural differences, and citizenship. There is also a directive for curricular proposals to have, as their guiding principles, interaction and play, taking into account students’ different backgrounds and experiences. Regarding the curriculum, Article 3 of this document states that:

the Early Childhood Education curriculum is conceived as a set of practices that seek to articulate children’s experiences and knowledge with that which is part of the cultural, artistic, environmental, scientific, and technological heritage, in order to promote the whole development of children from 0 to 5 years of age (Brasil, 2009a, Art. 3º, p. 1).

The systematization of the Early Childhood Education curriculum highlights the importance of children’s knowledge and the multiple experiences they have in their social environment. Therefore, this understanding of the curriculum proposes the expansion of children’s knowledge of the world by valuing what they already know. Interactions and play are considered the guiding principles of pedagogical work, which is significantly beneficial in this stage of education.

Art. 9 of the DCNEI, items I to XII, states the need for early childhood education that guarantee the materialization of different languages in a meaningful way. Thus, children should be given the opportunity to, among other things: broaden their sensory, expressive, and bodily experiences; take part in individual and collective activities; develop spatial and temporal orientation; develop quantitative relationships; learn about the physical and social environment; learn about cultural traditions; and engage with diverse manifestations of music and arts.

As far as reading and writing are specifically concerned, we would highlight sections II, III and IX, which signal possibilities for working with oral and written language in a generic way. This lack of clarity about working with written language may be due to the conflicts in the area regarding the subject. For example, when discussing the curriculum, CNE/CEB report 20/2009 states that “the curriculum in Early Childhood Education has been a controversial field with different perceptions of child, family and the role of nursery and preschool” (Brasil, 2009b, p. 6). In relation to working with writing, topic 9 of said report says that:

Children are also interested in written language. Living in a world where written language is increasingly present, children begin to take an interest in writing long before teachers formally introduce it to them. However, it must be pointed out that this subject is often not adequately understood and worked on in Early Childhood Education. What can be said is that working with written language with young children should definitely not be a mechanical practice devoid of meaning and centered on the decoding of writing. Its appropriation by the child takes place in the recognition, comprehension and enjoyment of the language used to write, mediated by the teacher, making itself present in pleasurable activities that allow contact with different written genres. These include, for example, the daily reading of books by the teacher, the possibility for the child to handle books and magazines from an early age and produce narratives and “texts”, despite not knowing how to read and write (Brasil, 2009b, p. 15).

We believe the report better explains the possibilities for working with reading and writing, valuing daily reading and the contact with written culture, as well as giving children the possibility of reading and producing texts, even without knowing how to read and write, rather than promoting mechanistic practices centered on decoding. When analyzing this passage, Brandão and Leal (2013) identify gaps in the specific work with literacy acquisition. We agree with the authors, since the literacy dimension is clearly explained in the report, which does not happen with the appropriation of alphabetic writing. We advocate that, in Early Childhood Education, as well as in Primary Education, literacy acquisition and development must go hand in hand. For this to happen in a meaningful way, there needs to be an explanation as to what can be done with the practices of writing as a notational system.

The Common National Curriculum Base (BNCC), published in 2017, proposes that children’s learning and development should be structured around interaction and play, ensuring that they have “the rights to live together, play, participate, explore, express themselves and get to know each other” (BRASIL, 2017, p. 36, emphasis added). The curriculum organization for Early Childhood Education in this document is structured into five fields of experience: “The self, the other, and the we”; “Body, gestures and movements”; “Lines, sounds, colors and shapes”; “Listening, speaking, thinking and imagining”; and “Space, time, quantities, relationships and transformations”.

The field of “Listening, speaking, thinking and imagining” refers to oral language by proposing that, in Early Childhood Education, children speak and listen, enhancing their participation in oral culture as subjects who belong to a social group. As for written language, it is, in a way, addressed in this field, when the child’s interest and curiosity is highlighted. The document emphasizes the importance of experiences with children’s literature for developing a love of reading, stimulating their imagination, and broadening their knowledge of the world. It also mentions the contact with different text genres, through which children build diverse knowledge (telling the difference between illustration and text, learning the direction of writing, etc.). It assumes that, by being around written texts, children “build hypotheses about writing that are initially revealed in doodles and scribbles and, as they get to know the letters in spontaneous, unconventional writing, that is already indicative of an understanding of writing as a system of language representation” (Brasil, 2017, p. 38).

Regarding the appropriation of alphabetic writing, one of the learning and development objectives related to the field of “listening, speaking, thinking and imagining” involves, in a way, phonological activities by proposing that children aged 4 and 5 “invent singing games, poems and songs, create rhymes, alliterations and rhythms” (Brasil, 2017, p. 45). In addition to these activities, the importance of spontaneously writing words and texts is stressed, which allows for “hypotheses to be raised in relation to written language” (Brasil, 2017, p. 46). We can therefore observe that the interactive and sociocultural facets of the initial stages of learning how to read and write (Soares, 2016) and literacy development are significantly covered by the BNCC. However, when it comes to the linguistic aspect, there is an absence of objectives that explicitly address the reflective work with the alphabetic writing system. This gap in the document does not occur by accident; it is the result of a lack of consensus on what should be worked on in relation to written language at this stage of education.

Thus, the BNCC seems to propose, as far as working with written language in Early Childhood Education is concerned, what was pointed out by Brandão and Leal (2010) as Path 2, “Literacy without letters”. Unfortunately, this omission contributes to the permanence, in educational spaces, of practices in which copies of letters and repetitive exercises are prioritized or in which there is no work with written language, since teachers remain uncertain about which aspects of writing should be approached at this stage of education. About that, we agree with Brandão and Leal (2010) and Morais (2012), who argue that children in Early Childhood Education can learn some principles of the alphabetic system within a playful experience, respecting childhood and its uniqueness.

Contrary to the BNCC, the National Literacy Policy (PNA), implemented by the government of President Jair Bolsonaro through Decree 9765 of April 11, 2019 (Brasil, 2019), defends Early Childhood Education as a preparatory stage for literacy, according to what Brandão and Leal (2010) described as Path 1 (the “literacy obligation”) for the treatment of written language in this first stage of Basic Education. The intention was to establish, based on scientific evidence from the cognitive sciences, a teaching model focused on phonics instruction, which isolated the learner from their social aspects in order to develop specific decoding and coding skills since the Early Childhood years, going in the opposite direction to what the BNCC proposes.

For Morais (2019), the perspective taken by the PNA is very inadequate. That is because, in addition to practicing standardized teaching, which ignores what the child thinks and does not take into consideration the diversity of knowledge of the learners in the same classroom, it has no commitment to the child’s motivation and rights when it comes to taking pleasure in playing with words or enjoying books and other texts from the children’s universe at an early age. For the PNA to be implemented it was necessary to develop “scientifically based” teaching materials for both Early Childhood Education and the initial years of Elementary School. Among these pedagogical materials are literacy acquisition textbooks that are evaluated, purchased, chosen and distributed by the National Book and Teaching Material Program (PNLD).

Thus, within the scope of the PNA, the PNLD 2022 Notice, published in 2020, proposed the evaluation and distribution of textbooks for children in the last two years of Early Childhood Education who, until then, did not use to receive textbooks from this program. As stated in the PNLD notice, the books intended for pre-school children (4 and 5 years old) should address the essential components of preparation for literacy advocated in the PNA, including, among other aspects, the “identification of the first sound (phoneme) of words”; the “segmentation of words into their sounds (phonemes)”; the “synthesis of sounds (phonemes) into words”; the “presentation of all letters in alphabetical order, block and cursive, one per page, paired in uppercase and lowercase, emphasizing their visual and motor representations”; and the “association of each letter with its dominant phonological realization” (Brasil, 2022). Such characteristics lead us to conclude that the textbooks for pre-school children would have to prioritize a phonics approach when “preparing for literacy”, as advocated by the PNA.

Methodology

As methodological procedures, we carried out a documentary analysis whose source were two collections approved in the PNLD 2022, both aimed at children in the last two years of Early Childhood Education. We analyzed the two most popular collections among teachers from the Education Departments of cities in the metropolitan area of Recife. The books analyzed were Porta Aberta (Volumes 1 and 2), by Isabella Pessôa de Melo Carpaneda (São Paulo, Editora FTD, 2020), and Bambolê (Volumes 1 and 2), by Gisela Mello, Jaime Teles da Silva, Letícia García, Vanessa Mendes Carrera and Viviane Osso L. da Silva (São Paulo, Editora do Brasil, 2020). The textbooks were analyzed by thematic content analysis (Bardin, 1977). From a quantitative and qualitative perspective, we developed categories to respond to our specific objectives.

Literacy acquisition proposals in the textbooks approved in the PNLD 2022

The results of the analysis of the Porta Aberta and Bambolê collections for pre-school children will be presented in two parts. Firstly, we will look at the organization of the volumes and the collection of texts they contain. Next, we will describe the analysis of the activities aimed at SEA appropriation in order to understand how they relate to the guidelines given by the BNCC and the PNA.

The organization of the textbooks and the text collection proposed for reading

The two volumes of the Porta Aberta collection are organized into four large units titled “movements”. This choice of term, according to the author, is related to the six learning and development rights adopted by the BNCC: being together, playing, participating, exploring, expressing, and getting to know oneself. In Volume 1, the titles of the units/movements are: “meeting and being together”, “playing and celebrating”, “exploring and discovering”, and “expressing and participating”. In Volume 2, the movements are: “interact and respect”, “play and celebrate”, “observe and learn”, and “express and value”.

Throughout the two volumes, the work with reading and writing is centered on teaching the letters of the alphabet and their correspondent sounds. In the first one, the section entitled “A, E, I, O, U, many letters for you” introduces the children to the vowels, and the section “collecting letters” works on some consonants (M, R, P, S, V). The second one proposes working with all the letters in alphabetical order in the “collecting letters” section.

In the teacher’s manual for both volumes, there is a “Syllabus - weekly” (Figure 1) indicating the lessons to be given each week. Each lesson “corresponds to one or more activities that can be carried out in one or two periods a day, thus enabling the teacher to have greater flexibility in conducting extra routines and activities” (Carpaneda, 2020a, p. 24). Throughout the units, the blocks of lessons with their respective pages are indicated to the teacher (Figure 2).

Figure 1:
Syllabus: weekly

Figure 2:
Indication of lessons for week 7

As we can see in Figures 1 and 2, in the seventh week of school the teacher is instructed to carry out lessons 51 to 60 (activities on pages 32 to 36), which involve teaching the letter A. Practically every day of this week, as well as the others, the 4- and 5-year-olds must do activities from the textbook.

In the Bambolê collection, each volume is divided into two parts, one for “Literacy” and the other for “Numeracy”. Each part is organized into four units. In the first block of both volumes, the initial unit includes phonological awareness activities, and the others focus on teaching letters and their sound correspondences.

As in the case analyzed above, the Bambolê collection teacher’s manual brings a table that shows the activities to be done each week. As shown in Figures 3 and 4, in the second bimester the children are supposed to do activities involving learning one letter each week. We believe that the proposition of these tables indicating what should be done each week of the school year seems to take on the perspective of a curriculum focused solely on ready-made content to be transmitted to the children, disregarding their knowledge and interests. As discussed by Moreira (2007, p. 7), the curriculum should reflect on “for whom, what, why, and how to teach and learn, recognizing interests, diversities, social differences, and also the cultural and pedagogical history of our schools”. However, this conception of curriculum is not the one guiding the work proposed in the two collections.

Figure 3:
Table with the sequential progression of content by week, Bambolê, v. 1

Figure 4:
Table with the sequential evolution of content by week, Bambolê, v. 2

The choice to teach the letters of the alphabet throughout the book, highlighting their different shapes and the respective sounds they represent, aims to meet the requirements of the 2022 PNLD Notice, which states, as mentioned above, that books intended for pre-school children should discuss, among other aspects, the “presentation of all letters in alphabetical order, block and cursive, one per page, paired in uppercase and lowercase, emphasizing their visual and motor representations” as well as the “association of each letter with its dominant phonological realization” (Brasil, 2020, p. 29-40).

As far as the text collection is concerned, there is a certain diversity of genres in both volumes of the two collections, with priority given to oral tradition texts. The genres corresponding to poems/rhymes and songs were the most present in both collections. Both genres are very interesting when it comes to working with language sounds. Other texts from the oral tradition, such as nursery rhymes and tongue twisters, are also present in the collections, especially in the Bambolê collection.

For Araújo (2011, p. 14), “giving visibility to texts from the oral tradition favors the appreciation and valorization of oral culture, popular imagery, the timeless poetic-musical tradition, our oral cultural heritage and tradition.” The author, however, points out that, before focusing on their potential for the appropriation of writing, it is necessary to consider that “the richness of working with these texts [rhymes, songs...] with children, especially younger children, lies in exploring their oral aspect, their playful dimension, their original form, as well as their primary objectives, which are to play, tell, sing, challenge, laugh, interact” (Araújo, 2011, p. 27).

Albuquerque and Brandão (2021) also point to the need to reflect on how these texts are taught in school, so that they are not used merely a playful pretext for working with letters, syllables, and rhymes. This seems to have been the focus of both collections, since the texts are used as a pretext for exploring a word beginning with the letter to be presented/taught in the lesson. Figures 5 and 6 show the first activities with the letter A in the two volumes of the Porta Aberta collection.

Figure 5:
Activity with the letter A, Porta Aberta, v. 1

Figure 6:
Activity with the letter A, Porta Aberta, v. 2

In the first volume, the letter A is presented in uppercase block, and the aranha (spider) song is proposed because it contains, in its title and in the text, a word that begins with the letter A. In the second volume, the letter A is presented in different formats, and the proposed text is a song that has the word anel (ring) in it. Part of this song is also present in Volume 1 of the Bambolê collection, in the lesson that teaches the letter A (Figure 7). In Volume 2, the text to be read to the children is a poem featuring the word agrião (watercress) (Figure 8).

Figure 7:
Activity with the letter A, Bambolê, v. 1

Figure 8:
Activity with the letter A, Bambolê, v. 2

Different genres are also present, although not as many, in the collections, such as short stories, comic strips, recipes and news. Our attention was drawn, for example, by the presence of didactic texts (seven of them) in Volume 2 of Porta Aberta. These are short texts that aim to teach children a certain content.

Activities for appropriating the Alphabetic Writing System (SEA)

The activities aimed at appropriating alphabetic writing were categorized based on two aspects: the units (letters, syllables, rhymes, phonemes) and the cognitive operations involved (reading, identification, comparison, exploration, counting, copying, writing, among others). Chart 1 shows the frequency of activities involving the different word units in the Porta Aberta and Bambolê collections (PNLD 2022).

Chart 1:
Frequency of activities involving different word units in the Porta Aberta and Bambolê collections (PNLD 2022)

CATEGORIES	Porta Aberta		Bambolê
	Volume 1	Volume 2	Volume 1	Volume 2
Activities involving letters	26	68	59	96
Activities involving phonemes	11	20	74	58
Activities involving syllables	27	62	22	32
Activities involving rhyming	15	5	22	21
Activities involving words	96	97	18	37
TOTAL	175	252	195	244

• Source: Developed by the authors.

As we can see, both collections bring a significant number of activities that involve working with letters. Except for Volume 1 of Porta Aberta, the material analyzed has a high frequency of activities that involve copying letters and tracing them. This is due to the fact that these activities are there every time a new letter is introduced, as we can see in the following examples, which involve teaching the letter A.

Figure 9:
Activity Letter A

Figure 10:
Activity letter A

Figure 11:
Activity letter A

As mentioned in the introduction, the PNLD 2022 Notice points out that books intended for the two years of preschool need to present “all letters in alphabetical order, block and cursive, one per page, paired in uppercase and lowercase, emphasizing their visual and motor representations” (Brasil, 2020). This is done in both collections, especially in the volumes aimed at 5-year-olds.

In Volume 1 of Porta aberta, there is less work on letters because the activities proposed involve teaching vowels and a few consonants, as mentioned before. On the other hand, there are activities involving the differentiation of letters/words/numbers (10). It is interesting that, unlike the other volumes, the children are not asked to copy the letters, but to trace them in some situations.

Activities involving work on phonemes are present in both collections, although more intensely in Bambolê. In the two volumes of this collection, for each letter presented there are activities that require the production of words that begin or end with the phoneme being studied and the identification of pictures whose names begin with the sound - or have the sound - of the letter being studied. The examples in Figures 12 and 13 show the latter with the sound of the letter A, in both volumes.

Figure 12:
Identifying a word with a particular phoneme

Figure 13:
Identifying a word with a particular phoneme

One of the problems with the phonic method (whose aim is to systematically present the letters of the alphabet and their respective sounds) is the nature of our writing system, which does not have a biunivocal relation between letters and sounds. Therefore, by asking children to identify pictures whose words begin with the sound of the letters of the alphabet, it is assumed that each letter has a single sound, which is not the case in our writing system. The activities in Figures 12 and 13, for example, ask children to color pictures “whose names begin with the sound of the letter A”, leading them to think that the letter A has only one sound. In Volume 2, in the lesson about the letter O, there is no mention of the fact that this letter has more than one sound, even though the pictures shown to the children start with different “O” sounds. In the activity in Figure 14, the children are asked to color the pictures “whose names begin with the sound of the letter O”, but there are pictures of an onça (jaguar) and an ovelha (sheep), which, despite beginning with the same letter, do not begin with the same sound.

Figure 14:
Identifying a word with a particular phoneme

As Chart 1 shows, Volume 1 of the Bambolê collection has the most activities involving phonemes. This is because besides the activities to identify and produce words with a given phoneme, there is an activity for each letter of the alphabet asking the children to represent/pronounce the sound of the letter being taught, as Figures 15 and 16 show.

Figure 15:
Oral representation of the phoneme

Figure 16:
Oral representation of the phoneme

These activities require 4-year-olds to say the word related to the picture, identify the first letter of the word, and then pronounce the sound that this letter represents. It is based on the assumption defended by the PNA that for children to become literate, they need to learn all the letters and their respective sounds, and that this learning should be guaranteed in Early Childhood Education. Researchers such as Soares (2016) and Morais (2019) point out, however, that activities involving the manipulation of consonant phonemes are difficult for children and adults in the process of literacy acquisition, as these phonemes are sound segments that cannot be pronounced in isolation.

On the other hand, Morais (2019), in his several studies on the relation between phonological awareness and literacy, has also found that literate subjects, when carrying out activities involving phonemes - such as segmenting words into phonemes, counting phonemes in words or identifying the initial phoneme of a word - rely much more on letters, which correspond to graphic units, than on phonemes, which indicates that they also have difficulties responding to activities that require them to isolate and manipulate the phonemes of words.

Still regarding activities with phonemes, Volume 2 of the Porta Aberta collection also has a significant number of tasks which ask the students to identify pictures whose words start with the sound of the letter studied in the lesson.Figure 17 shows an example of this activity.

Figure 17:
Identifying words with a certain letter

This activity is difficult for children who do not yet know how to read and write, as they do not have the graphic support to know which letter starts the words related to the pictures. The teacher’s manual instructs the teacher to encourage the children to verbalize what is in the box on the page. The teacher should write the words corresponding to these objects on the board and read the words, emphasizing their initial sound. Next, they need to write the words corresponding to the objects in the children’s hands, call attention to their initial sound, and ask if these objects can go into the box. It is, therefore, an activity that involves working with phonemes, although there is no mention of the sound of the letters in the instructions the book gives to the students.

As for activities involving syllables, they are present in both collections, especially Porta Aberta. Most of the activities involve counting syllables in words and breaking words down into syllables. These activities are important because, as part of the process of appropriating the SEA, children need to understand that words are divided into smaller sound segments called syllables.

Although both collections contain many texts from the oral tradition, activities involving the exploration of rhymes and alliteration are more present in Bambolê. The most frequent ones in Volumes 1 and 2 of this collection are those that require students to identify rhymes, followed by those that involve writing or producing rhyming words orally.

As far as activities involving words are concerned, we can see from Chart 1 that they are much more frequent in Porta Aberta than in Bambolê. Both volumes of Porta Aberta provide opportunities for reading, writing, and copying words, as well as identifying them in texts. The Bambolê volumes focus on reading words and counting words in texts.

Final considerations

As discussed in the introduction, according to the PNLD 2022, the books approved had to be in line with the BNCC principles and, above all, with what was proposed in the PNA. These two documents, however, have very different guidelines for working with written language in Early Childhood Education. While the BNCC follows the National Curriculum Guidelines for Early Childhood Education (Brasil, 2009a) and proposes objectives in the areas of literacy that respect children’s interests and their rights to learn, play and interact, as discussed by Brandão (2021), the PNA approaches Early Childhood Education as a preparatory stage for literacy, prioritizing objectives related to the development of phonemic awareness through the memorization of graphophonic correspondences.

Thus, regarding the objectives of our research, we conclude that the Porta Aberta and Bambolê collections, approved by the PNLD 2022 and aimed at children in the last two years of Early Childhood Education, demonstrate through the quantity and nature of their activities that their main focus is on teaching children to read and write from a phonics perspective, according to the PNA prescriptions. Both collections emphasize preparing children for literacy acquisition, focusing on motor coordination exercises, auditory and visual discrimination, and explicit teaching of the relation between alphabet letters and their respective sounds.

About the text collection, we found a diversity of text genres related to the different fields of experience outlined in the BNCC, with priority given to texts from the oral tradition. These texts, however, had the main objective of making it possible to work with words beginning with the letter/phoneme being taught. As for SEA appropriation activities, we observed that the books analyzed contain a variety of activities that explore different units of the word, from those more focused on tracing and copying letters to those involving work at the phoneme level. In this sense, the proposals for teaching reading and writing in such collections, in accordance with the PNA, ignore “children as subjects” and aim at “school purposes” defined from the perspective of children’s education as a “preschool” - a school that is not for children, but for another school (Lopes; Dantas, 2022, p. 31-32).

We understand that curricular choices and teaching practices are not neutral because, depending on how they are, pedagogical work will either be aimed at a human approach to education or at the education of dependent and conformed subjects. Thus, our choices guide the type of children we want to educate. In this sense, we highlight the importance of curricular organization and pedagogical practices in Early Childhood Education that guarantee children “the rights to live together, play, participate, explore, express themselves and get to know oneself” (Brasil, 2017, p. 36), considering their autonomy and uniqueness so that they can develop physical, cognitive, psychosocial, and motor aspects. We need to rethink pedagogical practices, spaces, and teaching resources for Early Childhood Education in order to make sure that learning experiences take into account the specificities of the child as a historical and rightful subject, and consider interactions and play as structuring axes, as proposed by the DCNEI and the BNCC.

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• SUPPORT/FINANCING

  Support from CNPq, Call CNPq/MCTI/FNDCT No. 18/2021 - Track B - Consolidated Groups, process 406694/2021-4

• 1
  This work was carried out with financial support from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

• RESEARCH DATA AVAILABILITY

  Data will be provided if requested.

Data availability

Data will be provided if requested.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  26 Aug 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  15 Oct 2023
• Accepted
  07 May 2024