Forming Readers and Writers: How and Why

By Litza Amorim

Curriculum Coordinator at Builders School and Gara School — PhD in Education from the University of São Paulo and author of the book J.H. Pestalozzi and His Letters on Education (Comenius Publishing House, 2025).

Long before learning to read words, children learn to “read” life and the world.

In their daily lives, they learn which games exist and can be played, which people they enjoy talking to, and who can help them when they need support. Reading and books can become this extension of the world and can be enjoyed with the same intensity and interest with which children play on a tire swing or prepare a new recipe.

By experiencing frequent and loving reading practices, children may soon, just as they choose a favorite teddy bear, choose a favorite book. Reading can become an extension of play — an activity in which young readers imagine themselves as pirates, princesses, animals, traveling children, and many other characters, venturing into and being surprised by literary experiences.

Likewise, just as children love talking and discovering what happens in different contexts within the school, exchanging letters and notes between Early Childhood Education classes can be highly stimulating. Young children’s reading and writing experiences can also be very practical, involving invitations, recipes, notes, and posters that help organize the community, with messages such as:

“Do not throw pineapple peels into the compost bin.”

Reading and writing need purpose

As children grow, the challenge of “deciphering letters” emerges. But the reasons for reading and writing — these should never be lacking.

Délia Lerner, a researcher and educator in the field of literacy and writing, inspires the Builders School and the Gara School in our purpose of creating small societies of readers and writers within the school environment.

Writing and reading for classmates — and perhaps even publishing comments in “real” magazines and newspapers — frees students from the limitation of producing texts only for teachers or simply to earn grades. When reading and writing gain meaning, they become tools for expression, communication, and identity construction.

Literature broadens repertoires and develops critical thinking

The literary works that should compose a school curriculum range from the most classic fantasy narratives to life stories intertwined with emblematic social dramas.

Children and adolescents have the right to know fables, Indigenous myths, traditional Arabic tales, and chivalric romances — literary genres that, “in our society, many people often spend their entire lives unable to know or truly experience,” as highlighted by Jacqueline Magalhães, literacy specialist and Master of Education (PUC), Language Arts consultant for Builders and Gara.

Adolescents’ experiences with fiction that addresses relevant social issues help them reflect on the ethical dilemmas experienced by the characters. These experiences encourage young people to immerse themselves imaginatively in humanitarian questions, developing intelligence and sensitivity toward moral issues — without sermons, moralistic perspectives, or authoritarianism.

For example, while reading Maus, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, our eighth-grade students reflect on difficult questions concerning humanity and realize how a graphic novel can employ powerful aesthetic forms to communicate beyond words.

While reading A Bottle in the Gaza Sea, the same students become engaged with a novel that unfolds through exchanges of messages between two young people, expressing a longing for life, love, and freedom amid the echoes of war.

Forming readers is forming people

By cultivating the habit of selecting books, reading them, discussing them, evaluating them positively or negatively, and participating in individual or group reading practices — in which one person’s perspective enriches another’s — we form not only the ability to read, but the reader: someone who uses books to dream, feel, and think about life and the world.

Readers, in turn, enrich their cultural repertoire in broad and sometimes unpredictable ways, but they will certainly act with greater reflection, creativity, and sensitivity in their personal lives, as citizens, and in their professional paths, benefiting society as a whole through their contributions.