Choose Joy: An Early Childhood Education Blog

  Do you consciously use visual thinking strategies (VTS) to understand new pieces of fine art? Do you use them to make sense of other images? VTS are often incorporated into museum programs; visitors and researchers alike describe this meaning-making process as an invigorating experience. Cognitive psychologist, Abigail Housen and former MoMA director of education, Phillip Yenawine, originally developed VTS in 1991 to expand museum visitors' visual literacy skills. Today, VTS is used in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms across the country as a means of cultivating visual literacy and supporting comprehension. New research suggests VTS even builds preschool children’s visual literacy capacities and that it nurtures their oral language development (Yenawine, 2018)—a key contributor to reading success. So, how can you get started using VTS with your students and/or children? The first step is to select an appropriate piece of artwork. Finding images that make good us...

These days it seems that teachers and parents are devoting an ever-increasing amount of time and energy to supporting the decoding efforts of very young children. In the varied preschool and kindergarten settings I observed over this past year, automatic letter recognition, noticing the distinct sounds in words, mapping sounds onto letters, and blending sounds to make new words were common instructional focuses. On the one hand, this is encouraging news—a mountain of research suggests that these skills are prerequisites to the development of fluent reading. And, they haven’t always been targeted in early childhood settings. On the other hand, whenever we increase the amount of time and energy spent on one component of learning to read, we risk decreasing the amount of time spent on equally important components. In his book, The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads , cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham warns us of this phenomenon: “When we con...