RESUMO

Early childhood education has, as the first step of elementary school, the objective of the full development in what comes to physical, psychological, intellectual and social aspects of the child. The playing is an essential activity for small children and must be included in early childhood education context in a conscious way, wich respects the needs of the children; however, playing is not enough, quality playing is essential and, accomplished that, it is crucial to pay attention to the mediators of the activity. The present paper, through a qualitative descriptive research, intends to analyze how the playing is seen during early childhood education, what kind of mediation is done by the teacher and how she understands it. We aimed to get to our objectives by observing the daily life of a public school class and by interviewing the teacher. The observation period was of two months, in a total of twenty one observed days. The interview occurred by the end of the classes observations and in a semi-structured way. While collecting data we tried to understand how the games happen, how they are mediated by the teacher and by the context by her organized, where the children are inserted. The triangulation of the data, strategy that allows the confrontation of the information obtained in the data collection and bibliographic research, made it possible for us to analyze, in an integrated way, the data obtained by the observations and by the interview, always with the support of bibliography, that has Vigotski's theory as base. As a result for that, we got to the awareness that the insertion of the playing in the child's scholar routine is done according to the comprehension or importance given to it by the teacher. We could understand the importance of the context and its organization to the children. In this research we came across a teacher conscious of the importance of the playing, but in a school where understanding and stimulating the playing is still necessary.

O brincar, atividade fundamental da infância, possibilita à criança diversão e exploração do mundo, como produto e produtora da cultura e da sociedade em que está inserida. O desenvolvimento urbano, seguido da violência nas ruas, tem provocado uma falta de tempo e de espaço para as crianças brincarem, principalmente nas grandes cidades. Em meio a esse contexto, o foco desse trabalho é refletir, a partir da observação de crianças brincando em um parque público da cidade de São Paulo, sobre como as crianças brincam, adaptando-se a esse modo de vida atual, como se relacionam e negociam entre si, nos momentos dedicados ao brincar. A partir de observações realizadas, pôde-se perceber a dinâmica da organização interna da atividade promovida pelas próprias crianças, a presença do líder como fator que influencia nessa organização e a importância do material (brinquedo) como fonte geradora da atividade e, então, levantar reflexões sobre estas questões.