Tag Archives: visual literacy

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Visual Literacy with Wordless Books

I’ve been meeting with a group of students from 3rd & 4th grade to talk about our reading lives. The purpose of these groups, which are facilitated by 2 of our gifted-certified teachers, is to have a space for students to read books of their own choosing and spend time talking about those books together and sharing them with the larger reading community. We’ve been trying many different things to support students in having meaningful discussion together. For this session, we decided to focus on divergent thinking using images from wordless books. We wanted students to practice moving through an “I see….I think…..I wonder” sequence to discover many possibilities from one or two visual stimuli from each book.

To start, we looked at an image from Christian Robinson’s book Another. Students shared things that they saw without assigning any opinions or interpretations. They quickly realized that this was harder than it sounded because I followed up most observations with questions.

Common noticings were “there’s a girl walking down stairs” or “there’s a cat chasing another”.  I asked them to describe what they saw that made them think the image was a girl or a cat.  This took several tries until they really got to a point of describing without interpretation.

Then, we moved to “I think” and “I wonder”. This was a chance for them to make interpretations about what they saw in the image as well as wonder about the possibilities of what might happen in the future of the book.

What we’ve noticed in student discussions of their books with text is they often stay at the surface of their book. They give a summary or name the characters/setting. They aren’t always naturally thinking of how the story sends their mind in many different directions. Our hope for this visual exercise was to practice this divergent thinking in a small way.

Ahead of our lesson, I took photographs of 1-2 pages from 20 different wordless books and put the images on separate slides. As students left the carpet, the teachers emailed the presentation to the students and I turned on editing rights. I also assigned each student a number.  They found their corresponding slide and used the notes section of the slide to practice their “I see….I think….I wonder”.  The teachers and I rotated around to talk to students about their noticings and wonderings.  Some of our conversations weren’t ever documented in the notes section, but the most important piece was the conversation that was happening.

Many students quickly discovered that seeing just 1 or 2 images gives you a unique perspective on a book. You don’t have the context of the rest of the story. They wanted to see the rest of the book, so at the end of our time together, students had a chance to read the rest of the book to see how their assigned image fit in with the rest of the story.

The teachers plan to revisit some of these slides in the future and make connections to the other books students are reading to hopefully have them think beyond just what is happening in the text to think about many possibilities and wonderings for their stories.

 

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Visual Literacy with a Picture Book Mystery

Ms. Freeman, 5th grade reading teacher, is always brainstorming ways to make the reading standards more engaging for students.  One of the standards focuses on how visual and multimedia elements enhance the text.  Specifically, the standard is:

ELAGSE5RL7  Analyze how visual and multimedia elements contribute to the meaning, tone, or beauty of a text (e.g., graphic novel, multimedia presentation of fiction, folktale, myth, poem).

She wondered aloud with me about what we might do together in the library with this standard, and we came up with a visual mystery of sorts.  Before students came, I selected about 30 picture books and copied 1 page with 1 accompanying illustration from each book.

When students arrived, we took a look at the standard and then read Dad and the Dinosaur by Gennifer Choldenko and Dan Santat.

The students were quick to notice the amount of figurative language packed into this book.  As we read, I slowed us down so that we could really look at the illustration and how it matched Gennifer Choldenko’s words as well as how it enhanced her words.  We imagined Dan Santat receiving the text without the pictures and how he might visualize the illustrations while he read.  We noticed how the grass looked like a sponge when Choldenko talked about the “spongy grass”.  We noticed the boy’s face lit up in green when Choldenko talking about how it “glowed like a glow stick”.  We made lots of noticings.

Then, I gave each student one of the pages of text that I had copied.  I asked them to imagine that they were the illustrator receiving this text.  What did they visualize as they read?

Once students had a chance to read the passage and create a picture in their mind, they wandered around the library tables where I had spread out all of the images that matched the text. They had to search for the image that they felt matched their text.

It was very tricky for some because some of the text could potentially match more than one image, but if they looked at the details of the text and the details of the illustration, they should be able to find the exact match.

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Matching text and pictures. #visualliteracy

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When students felt confident in their choice, they recorded a Flipgrid video explaining why they felt like their match was correct.

Click the image to listen to our videos

Finally, students went to another set of tables where the full books were spread out.  They located the book with their image and explored the title, the images, and rest of the text.  Many students discovered a picture book that they wanted to continue reading.  Several have been back since the lesson to check out the book.

Another student came to the library to show me one of her guided reading books and how there was a mistake between the image and text.  The color of a dog’s collar did not match the description in the text and she wanted me to see that she noticed.  I loved that her author and illustrator eye continued on beyond our lesson in the library.

This took some time to put together, but Ms. Freeman and I were really happy with how it turned out and how many students explored books that they might not explore on their own.