Visual Literacy Strategies for the K12 Classroom

Moving beyond the written word, students should be encouraged to analyze all text features, including visual images. How including visual literacy learning strengthens reading skills.

Visual literacy is an important piece of overall literacy learning. From the very earliest standards in Kindergarten all the way through 12th grade, common core standards for English Language Arts focus on important visual literacy skills to integrate knowledge and ideas at all grade levels.

With visual literacy skills being continually built upon from one year to the next, it’s apparent that it’s a valuable standard that should be covered in-depth every year with a variety of grade-level texts. Students should be working to not only analyze visuals that are paired with texts, but they should also be working to create visuals based on their understanding of the texts they read.

Practice Regular Visual Thinking Strategies

Visual thinking strategies encourage students to express their ideas and make meaning with the text through the creation of their own visuals. The visuals can be hand-drawn with crayons, colored pencils, and/or markers or digitally created using programs such as Adobe Spark, Canva, Google Suite, and/or Microsoft 365 depending on classroom resources and students’ preference. Visuals can be constructed relatively quickly at the end of a class as a survey of students’ understanding of a chapter or section and used as a check for understanding, exit ticket, or formative in-class assignment.

Visual Storytelling Through Storyboards

Visuals can also be used as a summative assessment for a final project in the form of storyboard or one pager. For the storyboard visual literacy assessment, I often utilize this strategy when reading a play and have the students recreate a scene by reimagining a section of the story through their own authorship. When modeling the storyboard task with students, I make sure to show them multiple versions of a text, such as The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, with watching excerpts from plays and movie clips, as well as viewing picture book and graphic novel versions. Therefore, the students are able to encounter a variety of ways numerous people have approached their own telling of the story based on the original version.

Summative Overviews With One Pagers

One pagers are great visual literacy summative assessments for a chapter or section in a text or with a short story. The goal is to keep the information all on one 8.5x11 page, either in portrait or landscape format. One pagers give a wonderful visual overview of what was read and push the students to think about and carefully select what’s really important and meaningful from their reading of the written work. Students choose relevant images, significant vocabulary terms, noteworthy phrases/sentences that help to summarize the text and emphasize key literary elements. One pagers work to showcase the students’ understanding through concise and impactful visual designs tied to important text features.

A Great Resource to Support Visual Literacy in the Classroom

Looking for books to pair with visual thinking strategies for your classroom? Visual literacy learning is easy to integrate with Glose’s e-reading platform. Glose for Education is an engaging resource that turns reading into a fun and social activity for students. With access to 1000s of ebooks and audiobooks, teachers can match the right titles to their class’s reading standards with ease.

Keep up the classroom literacy learning with summer reading programs done right with Glose for Education. There are four simple steps to integrate the program for your students:

1. Create reading groups and customize reading goals
2. Pick books for students or give them the freedom to choose
3. Read with the class and lead fun, interactive discussions
4. Monitor progress to keep students on track

Once the students are set with their reading through Glose’s interactive platform, assign a storyboard or a one pager as a visual summative assessment due at the beginning of the new school year. Students will be grateful to avoid having to write lengthy book reports, and teachers will be able to get a jump start on covering those important visual literacy skills. Keep visual literacy learning going strong all year long with Glose for Education!

Reference:

Common Core State Standards Initiative: Preparing America’s Students for College and Career http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/