Have you ever heard of a picture walk?
It's reading without the text!
I know, weird concept to think about at first. However, studies have shown that children are able to cognitively construct deeper meaning in their brains using pictures from stories than simply listening to stories.
A picture walk is simply walking through pictures in a book with your child and coming up with your own story. This is a great way to build vocabulary and, not to mention, self esteem. Children love telling stories. A child can use pictures that are, seemingly, simple to us as the adult, and turn them in to something uniquely magical. Think about the joy of reading you child will have when you say "Today, you get to be the author. You get to tell me what these pictures mean in your own story". I wonder what the child might tell a story about. When I was 4-years-old I loved telling stories about kitty cats. I bet I would thread something about cats into my story, whether I saw a cat in the pictures or not! Ha!
Picture walks can easily evolve:
Asking questions. "How did that happen?"
Leading questions "Tell me more."
Picture walks can help a child identify how stories are divided in parts: beginning, middle and end.
We, as the capable adult, can write the story down in real time as it is spoken. Your child can see meaning making of text instantly!
Write their story. Save it. Read it back to them later. Maybe they love it, change it or laugh about it. Reading should be fun, not a chore.
This study linked below, uses brain scans of young children, showing that reading a picture book with children produced deeper learning than listening to recordings or watching a video of the same story.
And we love they used our favorite author Robert Munch for the stories!
Contact us for a visit to see our indoor and outdoor reading areas.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/05/24/611609366/whats-going-on-in-your-childs-brain-when-you-read-them-a-story?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20180524
