Before we begin with today’s topic, let us understand a little about the importance of the whole context. Reading and writing are important for every human, especially for young children. Reading helps them build skills. Reading and writing expose children to new words and teach them different ways of using a language. It also helps kids learn about general information from around the world, which makes it easier for them to learn about new subjects once they get to school.
To improve these skills such as reading comprehension in students, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective reading: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing.
There are some interesting benefits of reading books, and reading books can improve and increase a child’s vocabulary and comprehension skills. Mentioned below are such few benefits:
- It helps to reduce stress.
- Helps a person prepare to sleep.
- It prevents cognitive decline.
- Helps to live with better aspects.
Reading is good for everyone because, along with communication skills, it also improves focus, memory, and empathy. It reduces stress and improves mental health. Reading also allows a person to learn new things every day.
Now, if reading can help children with so much development, can you imagine how effective picture reading would be for kindergarten students? Picture books for young readers, like building blocks, promote literacy, improves sentence structure, and vocabulary skills. For young readers, picture books are an important part of learning how to read.
Picture books, especially kindergarten picture books, bring tremendous benefits to kids who are in the early stages of developing their reading skills. Illustrations shown alongside text provide invaluable aspects to help children build an understanding in fluency, vocabulary, and other foundational literacy skills. Reading picture books means developing interest among the learners. Kids look at pictures almost as they would watch a movie, and that helps learners understand and analyze a scene, even without knowing how to read. They can tell the story back in their own way and thus improve vocabulary.
So the main purpose of picture reading is to help kids with all the advantages of early learning because books rich with illustrations and photos offer many benefits to enhance reading comprehension. We have mentioned just a few of those benefits: as pictures provide children with visual clues to discover more about the narrative. Pictures show unwritten details, expressions, and context that helps everyone to compare.
The whole concept of picture reading is basically an activity in which children are given a picture to observe and present their observations orally or in writing. Picture reading activity is important as it includes a number of indicators for the learners. These are: observation and recording, analysis of the situation or theme.
Picture reading is one of the activities that support the development of early literacy skills. Apart from developing observation skills, visual thinking, confidence to read, analyzing skills, picture reading activity is always fun. The learning outcome of picture reading has proven to help kids tremendously. Picture comprehension provides children the opportunity to practice describing the image and to choose a sentence that best matches the picture. It is a great starting point to decode and understand stories.
So now that we know so much about the picture reading skill, let us understand how to teach reading strategies with picture books, especially with kindergarten picture books:
- Making predictions.
- Making connections.
- Inferring.
- Setting a purpose for reading.
- Activating prior knowledge.
- Visualizing.
- Asking questions.
- Determining importance.
All of the above will help you to teach a toddler to make best use of the kindergarten picture books. Picture reading is a vital activity in which kids learn from a picture, and they have to observe and explain what they understand. Picture reading is an important and necessary activity that learners use to indicate their abilities and develop skills.
Easy and fun activities in picture reading for kindergarten kids
- Let a child explain what they see in the picture.
- A child should be able to tell what they think about the picture.
- If it is an object, you can ask about what the child thinks about the colour, shape, material in the picture.
- If there is a person in the picture, you can ask what they think about the person.
- You can ask about the clothes the person is wearing in the picture.
Now that we understand the context, purpose, and objective of picture reading, let us look at some activities that will get students to actively engage with a text and increase their understanding while reading:
- Skim for the main idea.
- Scan for specific information.
- Summarize or paraphrase.
- Use context clues.
- Make predictions.
- Annotate the text.
- Consider other perspectives.
- Participate in a jigsaw activity.
List of reading activities and examples:
- Partner Pretest.
- Stand Up/Sit Down.
- Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down.
- Secret Answer.
- Response Cards.
- Think-Pair-Share.
- Quick Writes.
- One Word Splash.
The advantages of picture reading activity are many, but inspiring a child’s visual thinking through illustrations in a picture book helps children understand what they are reading, allowing new readers to analyze the story. If children have difficulty with the words, the graphics can help them with the narrative, which can increase their comprehension.
One may ask, what is the method used to teach picture reading to kids? Well, there is no specific picture reading teaching method, but educators use random combinations of pictures to prompt a student’s imagination and to utilize the store of knowledge in the world, thus transferring it to desired language behavior.
Hence, at EuroSchool, we ensure to focus on a child’s development from the very beginning. We engage children in kindergarten picture books and picture reading activities very often. We know the importance of picture reading for kindergarten students, and hence we offer extended assistance to help kids develop and grow to their full potential.
