Reading is learning to understand
From the 7th to the 18th of November, the students of the Unidad Educativa Particular de la Asunción in Guayaquil took part in the Reading Festival, an initiative of the Language and Literature area which has been planned since the beginning of the year and which is the result of a Reading Plan drawn up by students and teachers.
During the first week, the children and young people presented posters on the reading of literary works and under the title "Do you want me to tell you...?" they invited their classmates to understand the world through works such as The Metamorphosis, 1984, The Black Cat and The Curious Crab, among others. As Savater says, reading allows us to live our lives and the thousands of lives that are offered to us through books.
In the second week, our students formed reading corners in the classrooms. They thought about reading from the sciences and offered their classmates spaces to read Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Geography and Philosophy. Through games, they solved problems, puzzles, chemical formulas and read labels. In this way the children recognised that there is no neutral or abstract activity of reading, but many ways of approaching the understanding of each discourse or text in each discipline of knowledge and in each human community.
At the end of the week we were lucky enough to have poets Miao Yi Tu (Taiwan) and Khédija Gadgoum (Tunisia) at the school. They came to the city for an international meeting, accepted our invitation, shared their works and then had a discussion with the children. The writers recognised the students' sensitivity to the problems of the world, their simplicity and strength of character in their opinions.