Education based on evidence

Hi! Welcome to our site. My name is Scheila Vontobel, and I am going to tell you a bit of our story.

Elefante Letrado was born in 2013, out of something I lived at home. My daughters Valentina and Guilhermina used an English reading platform and, every time they came back from school, they ran to the computer to read. I watched them and grew more and more fascinated by how much they enjoyed reading. So I started looking for a reading platform in Portuguese, so they could have the same performance and the same passion in their mother tongue. I found none. There was no digital reading resource in Portuguese specialised in developing reading with children. I dived into that literary world, gathered an outstanding team and, together, we took on the challenge of building the first digital Reading Platform focused on reading skills for children in the early years of elementary school.

Thirteen years later, Elefante Letrado is in more than 12 thousand schools, with thousands of books in Portuguese curated by renowned specialists. Beyond the Portuguese collection, there is an English library. Yes, we are bilingual! Hundreds of partner publishers make it possible to extend that collection, so we can better serve what different schools need. This is possible because we work with a great deal of dedication, research, data analysis, respect and passion for reading and education. In 2023 we took another important step in our story, launching the first Reading Fluency Test in Portuguese, entirely digital. With the help of artificial intelligence and a great deal of specialist-backed research, we can now identify each student’s level of reading fluency.

That is unprecedented and transformative. A child without reading fluency struggles to develop comprehension skills, and the lack of that fluency is one of the factors behind the high number of functionally illiterate people in our country. By supporting reading assessment in schools, we are positively affecting the lives of thousands of children in public and private networks, contributing to their inclusion in the world of reading and in the knowledge society.

But why Elefante Letrado? We chose an elephant as our mascot because it is known for its excellent memory. Memory is tied to legacy, to history, to the baggage of knowledge — everything one hopes to gain through books. Memory is also one of the main pillars of reading. And who has a better memory than an elephant?

Elefante Letrado exists to help transform lives through reading. It is a complex and moving mission! We are honoured to take part in the efforts of everyone who puts education and culture first, choosing reading as an instrument of transformation.

Scheila Vontobel, Founding Partner of Elefante Letrado