“Lights, Camera, Action!” — Cinema: Playing the Seventh Art in Early Childhood Education

Camila Rodrigues dos Santos, Pricila Karianne Holanda Nascimento, Edinalva Ribeiro Pimentel Urbano

(Centro Infantil Maria Leonor Freitas do Nascimento, Parnamirim, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil)

Abstract: Our article reports the experiences built and lived with the groups of the Early Childhood Education, in the axes of Arts and Movement, for the development and learning of the children aged between 2 years old and 5 years and 11 months old, in a center for early childhood education, located in Parnamirim city, in Rio Grande do Norte state, Brazil. It is a qualitative research in which we carried out a reflective report aiming to present our work in the project called “Lights, Camera, Action! — Cinema: Playing the Seventh Art at the CMEI Maria Leonor”. Through this project, we sought to create experiences in which the children could awake the sensitivity and the curiosity as well as develop their creative perception, ways of expressing themselves, and the interest in cinema. The project included 297 children from the morning and afternoon shifts at this school. We had experiences in the production, appreciation and contextualization about the cinema in which the children appropriated themselves of the cinema language through interaction and games. We highlight that the seventh art is a form of creative expression of the humanity which can be lived in the ludicity of childhood through concrete experiences. The children had an approximation to something far from their reality for, in the previous knowledge questionnaire, we found out that very few children knew about the cinema, as an artistic language, or had ever attended a movie theater before. Through this project they were able to go to a movie theater and produce, short and feature films, collectively in different genres such as a documentary about our childhood education center. We also emphasize the importance of working using several languages through this project, specifically the audiovisual one, in an interdisciplinary proposal which considers the protagonist role of the children in the construction of meaningful learning.

Key words: children, cinema, experiences