How to Teach Students to Read the Pictures
How to Teach Students to Read a Book by Reading the Pictures can be downloaded at the end of this post.
In an ideal world, a preschool child has been read to many, many times for the sheer enjoyment of falling in love with books. These literacy experiences build an understanding in a child’s brain of how books work.
Children who are read to gain understanding in left-to-right directionality.
They learn that stories have characters and the characters have problems that must be solved. They predict what will happen. They infer how characters are feeling and/or why characters behave as they do in the stories. Children who are read to evaluate text by choosing to hear favourite stories over and over again, sometimes to the dismay of whomever is reading!
When these children enter school, they bring the prerequisite skills needed to become a reader and a writer.
What can teachers do for students who haven’t been read to regularly?
For our students who haven’t been read to, teaching them how to read a book by reading the pictures is one way to build the literacy skills they missed in their early years.
But wait! You don’t have to teach these lessons in a small-group setting. These lessons benefit each and every student in your class. How?
1st
Instill the Joy of Reading
These lessons help build a sense of community within your classroom as everyone is immersed in the joy of reading great stories together.
2nd
Teach Story Elements
You’ll be explicitly teaching story elements to your students. The students who come from a rich literacy background will learn terms connected to the skills they already gained from being read to in their preschool years. Your students who haven’t been read to regularly will learn both the story elements and the terms associated with the elements.
3rd
Students Read Books They Love
These lessons teach students how to read any book that has images. That means a picture book a student falls in love with can be “read” even if the book’s text is too difficult for that student to read.
Download your copy of the lesson plans and a visual you can use to teach your students How to Read a Book by Reading the Pictures. The lessons are suitable for kindergarten to Grade 2 students. Depending on your student population, however, these lessons can be taught in a small-group setting in Grade 3 or higher.
