The present study is inserted in the Research Line "Education, Language and Psychology" of the Post-Graduation Program of the Faculty of Education of the University of São Paulo (USP). Considering the teaching of written language, the school's primary function in a perspective of forming proficient readers and writers, warrants the Literacy Cycle as a privileged scope of attention, mainly when bearing in mind the unsatisfactory results of evaluation researches about the school performance. In this regard, the present research aimed to study pedagogical practices in 1 st to 3 rd grades of elementary schools. Since in the school environment there can be oscillation in the teaching proposals with different implications for the learning process, the focus of this investigation is on teacher's practices and interventions. Therefore, this study was formed by the observation of six groups of the Literacy Cycle in a state school in São José dos Campos-São Paulo, in two different moments (2014 and 2015), in order to register forms of teaching the Portuguese Language, based on four paths: the nature of the activity, the nature of the demand directed to the student, the linguistic nature of the proposal and the interactional nature in the class production dynamics. The data were collected based on dialogical concepts of the language (Bakhtin) and interactionist concept of the learning process (Piaget and Vygotsky); more specifically, in literacy as a human process resulted from the progressive approach of the student with the written cultures in situations of reflection and real social communication (Geraldi, Ferreiro, Teberosky, Lerner, Weisz and Sanchez). This research concluded the predominance of activities based on a notational perspective, in which the object and the reasons to write prevail over the definition of interlocutors. In other words, in this research writing at school was more an object of learning than a communicative practice. Teaching, in turn, was centered in the teacher, that is, students had few opportunities to reflect or interact among themselves. All this information proves the oscillation amid classes of the same grade, as well as in each group's progress, which emphasizes the diffusion of Portuguese activities in plannings not always coherent with the group's profile or with the official teaching directions. The analysis of these information brings the urge to rethink about teaching plannings and progression of the work at school, besides, it subsidizes projects of professional development for teachers.