EFFECT SUMMER LEARNING LOSS IN CHILDREN IN THE INITIAL PHASE OF LITERACY
reading, assessment, learning, language, predictors.
The school vacation period has been widely studied in the international literature as a period to be observed in the learning process. It is a period characterized as risk for loss or stagnation of learning, especially for children in situations of social vulnerability. The phenomenon is treated as "Summer Learning Loss" and is still scarce in Brazil. Objective: In this scenario, the objective is to evaluate predictive reading abilities in children at the beginning of literacy in two school periods, before and after school vacations. Method: 97 children from municipal schools in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte were recruited. 97 children evaluated in the year 2017, 52 children were evaded, totaling 46 children evaluated before and after vacations, between the end of level IV of early childhood education and the beginning of the first year of elementary education. Vocabulary skills, phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming, phonological work memory and letter recognition were assessed using national protocols. Results: Among the skills evaluated, there was stagnation in performance, without statistically significant differences, maintaining the same profile before and after school vacations. However, the score of the test scores was notorious, with results significantly lower than expected for the age group when compared to the national instruments literature. Conclusion: Although there was stagnation in the performance of language skills before and after the holiday period, the children in this study were less than expected in the development of predictors for reading.