The Importance of Visuals to Encourage Reading
After reading the articles and watching the videos this week, I had to laugh. This is because my first blog was all about puppets and interactive experiences. What a great way to engage students in the storytelling experience no matter what the child's age. Young students can make paper bag puppets and older students can use indirect characterization to design character puppets from a current novel study. Here is a link to my first blog post on : (Storytelling with Lizwald - Puppets). It is amazing how many puppets have been a part of our American culture and connects generations of Sesame Street, Muppet, and Mister Rogers fans. All of these TV personalities (and puppets) brought storytelling and education into our homes and impacted us for a lifetime. These shows were able to "grab viewers' attention to draw them into the storyline", which can be applied by librarians, authors, and illustrators, alike (Cahill & Bigheart, 2016).
When looking for bloggers to share for this post, I was drawn to Watch. Connect. Read. This is a very new blog to me, and the idea of using "trailers" and interviews with the authors and illustrators to "grab" young readers and, hopefully, draw them into the library, seemed like a great advertisement for reading. After looking through the different picture book interviews and trailers, I was drawn to Time for Bed, Old House by Janet Costa Bates and illustrated by AG Ford. In the written interview, Ms. Bates compliments her illustrator and how Mr. Ford "brought life" to her story. Later she comments that "picture books are like movies that you can view at your own pace". Illustrators provide the visual that help engage students in the storytelling experience.
After reading about how important these visuals are to bringing life to a story, it is a great idea of have students illustrate their own writings to place on display. My next thought was about just having students write or tell their version of a book based solely on the illustrations. They would create their version by only "reading" the pictures. This is a great lesson in early reading strategies, but could also be used with older students and patrons to encourage inferencing and context clues. This idea is supported by a blog post I found on The Blue Brained Teacher: Teach Visual Thinking: How to Read Pictures. What a great way to make reading fun!! Jessica Pyerk's Participation Palooza, also offers so many interactive experiences that add to the reading experience! (Pryek, 2014). "The cornerstone of good educational programming and the first and most important idea to integrate into storytime is the fact that children are more receptive to learning when they are having fun" (Cahill & Bigheart, 2012).
With the importance of illustrators in the forefront of my mind, I was impressed to come across Watch.Connect.Read's - 2021 Mock Caldecott. What a great way to highlight the importance of illustrators!! There are videos posted with the authors and/or illustrators sharing their picture books. Sharing these book and videos with students, would be another great way for students to appreciate the importance of the visual and the illustrator. Here is one such example with author Derrick Barnes and illustrator Gordon C. Bates with his newest book, I Am Every Good Thing. Another great point about visuals is so that students can see themselves in the story, no matter their race, gender, beliefs, etc. The visuals allow students to make connections not only to the reading experience, but also with the illustrations.
Having focused on the importance of visuals, I thought about incorporating this idea with some of the parables that I read this week. Parables, even though they are of a religious nature, can be "edited" to teach life lessons. Here are some great pointers from Scholastic for sharing Stories That Teach Life Lessons, along with several different parable representations. You can reference this list of parables.
Parable - Jesus and the Children
Parable - The Lost Sheep
Parable - The Two Sons
Parable - The Wise and Foolish Builders
Parable - The Prodigal Son
Parable - The Wedding Feast
References
Cahill, M & Bigheart, J. (2016, January/February). What can librarians learn for Elmo, Sid, and Dora: Applying the principles of educational television to storytime. Knowledge Quest, 43(3), 48-57.
Hi Elizabeth,
ReplyDeleteI loved reading your post, it had so many great ideas to make reading exciting and fun! The movie trailers for books seems like a perfect way to draw in readers and give them the excitement before reading the book, just as they do for movies! I really think I would love to try that out in a library someday. I also liked the idea of having the kids write or tell the story based off of only the pictures of the book, which would be a great activity promoting many literacy skills as you pointed out. Thank you for sharing!!
Elizabeth, This is such a great blogshare! Thank you for finding and sharing such a valuable resource! I love the idea of "trailers" to advertise a book. That would be a really great way to draw kids in, and even have them create their own trailer as an alternative to an old fashioned book report. And thank you for sharing the resource from Scholastic as it has so many wonderful ideas and outside of the traditional suggestions for parables.
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