The Spatial Notions of the Cultural Universe of Childhood - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 244

Studies developed in LABENCARTOGEO are the result of a trajectory of the
Brazilian studies about Cartography teaching at school, initiated after the I Collo-
quium of Cartography for Children, held in Rio Claro—SP, in 1995. The event was
held in 2009 and there some topics which need to be researched and studied were
recommended, among them are the topics concerning childhood. Although there
are several studies carried out by Brazilian researches about the genesis of the
spatial representation in children's drawings, these studies do not reach

kindergarten.
In order to meet this demand, we outlined this master's degree research entitled
“A study about the cartographic language and the time-space representation by
4-5 year-old children” (this research is funded from The State of S˜o Paulo
Research Foundation, FAPESP). This research is mainly justified by the compre-
hension of time-space-body organization established by children and their
representations, aiming to contribute to a childhood-related cartography. For this,
we need to comprehend the motor-sensorial development of the child.

20.2 Time-Space-Body Organizations

With the comprehension of the fact that time and space are inextricably linked
comes a pertinent question: how this relation is present in childhood, once space
and time are fragmented and little by little acquire linearity and a sequential sense?
One of the clues to answer this question is to consider that it is through the relations,
which are established in the social groups in which they are inserted that the pre-
school children become aware of the different dimensions and relative values
concerning time-space.
In this sense, we have an important reference on Vygostky and his successors for
the analysis of the registers of teaching situations. Vygotsky's postulations about
the biological and social factors in the psychological development point to two
complementary ways of investigation: on one side, the knowledge of the brain as
a material substrate of the psychological activity, and, on the other side, the culture
as an essential part of the constitution of the human being, in a process in which the
biological becomes social-historical (Oliveira 1992 ).
Considering this, the same author shows that the emergence of the orality allows
a new structural organization of the action, attributing to the symbolic activity
initiated with the speech an organizational function which produces fundamentally
new forms of behavior (Vygotsky 2008 ). There is a convergence between the speech
and the practical activity (action) in a way that the children control the environment
through the use of the speech, before controlling their own behavior. There is
a relation among time, space and speech. With the help of the speech, the children
reorganize the visual-spatial field, evoking absent objects through the word and
creating a temporal field that is perceptual, real and visual as well (Almeida 1994 ).
In the same line, Wardsworth ( 1989 ) presents the language as a social knowl-
edge of adaptive value, that in the period between ages 2-4 or 5 is not characterized