Reading Club

In an old carpentry workshop at Teatro da Voz, the From Letter to Voice Reading Club (Clube de Leitura Da Letra à Voz) came to life in 2018. A very special place to discover some of the best books for children, aimed at the school community of A Voz do Operário’s and neighbouring schools.

Our proposal is based on the intersection of reading and writing with the act of speaking. By activating the book through performative means, we seek to enhance the range of meanings that each word can contain according to the voice that animates it, in a movement that fosters a dissonant collective.

This place is inhabited by very diverse graphic objects, capable of sparking young children’s curiosity, and triggering older children’s desire to express themselves freely about what moves them – emotions, fears and dreams, human rights, care for the planet – and appreciation of the importance for each person to find their own voice in talking about all this.

Here, the only rule is to interact with books and have fun doing so among peers. Such is what the Free Reading Group (Grupo de Leitura Livre) is about, an extracurricular activity aimed at children in the elementary school’s first cycle, in which we practice the act of reading aloud and of actively listening to the book and the person reading it.

We want to activate dynamics to build a community of readers and listeners, of books and reading enthusiasts, promoting opportunities for young readers to share their readings with older readers, so that older generations can meet with younger ones around a book or an oral narrative, and a significant event can arise from this encounter.