The school broadens the child’s worldview. Beyond their home and time spent with family, spaces expand, new faces appear, and daily life invites new experiences and interactions. Gradually, the school environment ceases to be merely familiar and becomes understood. This is the purpose of the project All about be.Living, carried out with the Green classes of Early Childhood Education.

Designed as a project that renews itself each year, it begins with a simple and profound gesture: bringing children closer to the people who are part of school life. “Started with the proposal that the children could get to know the people who make up our team, our school community,” explains the pedagogical coordinator of Early Childhood Education, Camila Maia. This movement happens precisely at a time when children, around three years old, expand their paths within the school, moving through new spaces and building new relationships.

By getting to know the people around them better, the child also begins to feel more secure and independent. Knowing whom to turn to, anticipating small everyday solutions, and recognizing the school’s pathways are learnings that are built in this process. Little by little, they come to understand that they can act in situations such as looking for a piece of paper to continue a drawing, asking for ice in the kitchen after getting hurt, or finding, with help, ways to solve small everyday challenges. “As they get to know the people better and understand what happens in that space, they are able to move through it more safely, both because of its predictability and because it is familiar,” explains Camila.

Over the past few years, the project has undergone important revisions. A closer look at the curriculum and at the relationships experienced within the school brought new questions: What are children actually learning by observing adults? What ideas about the world are being reinforced or inspired toward transformation?

From these reflections, the project gained new layers. In dialogue with the training sessions on “Education for ethnic-racial relations,” the team began encouraging children to look beyond the roles performed by each person at the school. The goal is to move beyond the view of “who does what” and toward “who these people are.”

The interviews conducted by the children with school professionals, an activity that is part of the All about be.Living project, became a central point of this transformation. Initially focused on tasks, the questions began to include the interests, stories, games, and life experiences of our female and male collaborators. “The idea now is for the children to get to know these people beyond what they do here at school, but for who they are,” says the coordinator.

Thus, Ana, from the cleaning staff, can share a bread recipe she likes to prepare, Selene, from the kitchen, can talk about the games that marked her childhood, such as the soapbox cart, and Elias, the school doorman, can play ball with the group, revisiting something that is also part of his story. Gradually, children begin to learn about the tastes, memories, and interests of these people, realizing that each one carries life paths, affections, and experiences beyond the school environment. What is built in this encounter is a more human, closer relationship, shifting the focus from the role to the person, opening space for the deconstruction of stereotypes in a natural and respectful way.

Parallelly, the project also invites children to see themselves as active participants in caring for the shared space. Small everyday situations become opportunities for reflection. “As children go on to understand that we are all responsible for taking care of the school,” explains Camila. “Instead of calling someone to solve the problems that arise, they begin to seek solutions, asking for help when necessary and acting with greater autonomy”.

This movement goes beyond the school walls. A survey sent to families posed a new question: what are the responsibilities of children at home? The result was revealing. “Some families were surprised and realized that it was time to include children more in everyday tasks,” says the coordinator. The proposal, made with care and openness, also broadened reflection to the family environment, strengthening the idea of shared responsibility.

This perspective, which is also shaped at home, reverberates in the relationships experienced at school. By recognizing themselves as an active part of caring for the spaces, children begin to relate differently to the adults who are there. In simple everyday situations, such as juice spilling on the floor, it is no longer a matter of calling Ana to take care of it, but of looking for her or another adult to ask for a cloth so that they themselves can clean it up. Small gestures like this reveal an important shift: care is no longer assigned to a single person and comes to be understood as a shared responsibility, lived with greater respect and collective awareness.

Another important aspect of the project is the beginning of a systematization of investigative thinking. By experiencing problem situations and seeking answers, children come into contact with stages of a research process: they formulate questions, raise hypotheses, interview, listen, and construct meaning. “It’s an initial contact with a research procedure, in a very concrete and meaningful way,” explains Camila.

All of this happens at a time when children are fully capable of beginning this type of construction. “Three-year-old children have full competence to start thinking about this. Even if not everything is fully understood, the invitation to reflect already produces important shifts,” he says.

At the end, the project reveals something greater: the school as a space of relationships, where learning is not only about receiving content, but about the ways of being with others, caring for the collective, and recognizing oneself as part of a shared environment. In Green’s daily life, getting to know the school also means learning to care for the world.