L’Iconotexte en action en classe de Maternelle

Abstract

The 2015 scholar programs suggest to the preschool pupils “explore the space”. At the end of the first cycle, pupils must be able to locate themselves in space thanks to the experiment and to represent it. These two skills imply acquisition and recurrent use of topological and kinetic vocabulary, production of spatial representations (maps and models) and tracking in these representations. Some children’s picturebooks, often read in Pre-School, can be considered as “spatial products”. They suggest simple itineraries that require, for the reader, landmarks, comprehension of the configuration of the space in which the fiction takes place and comprehension of an itinerary. In this paper, we will report recent researches we led in a rural school of Indre-et-Loire with a 4-6 YO class. The protocol set up had the ambition to suggest a reading of some picturebooks, allowing to pupils manipulate “daily concepts” of structuration in space. The purpose was to demonstrate how pupils could use iconotextual language to tell a story, to relate an itinerary and so to train their “spatial memory”.

Keywords

• picture book
• space
• iconotext
• spatial reading