Make it Visual!

Before I was a professor at a university, I was a school-based SLP working for a special education cooperative. During this time, I worked as an SLP in an early childhood pre-school classroom. I loved working with this population, especially because I was able to do push-in therapy and work alongside the teachers to help our “littles” develop crucial early language and communication skills. One of my favorite things to do was to plan group language activities. In the early childhood classrooms in which I worked, the teachers, as most pre-school teachers do, designed curriculum around themes that typically corresponded with seasons, holidays, or monthly themes (e.g. dental month). There were so many good children’s books that centered around these themes, but sometimes I struggled finding books that were at an appropriate level for my students with cognitive delays or learning disabilities. Other times, I found great books, but they weren’t always interactive enough to maintain the attention of my students. This led me to writing theme-based books for my language lessons that were picture based, interactive and contained repetitive text. They were a huge hit and I saw so many wonderful skills developing in the students as a result of using these books. When I started working at the university, these books went into a cabinet and were occasionally brought out so that my students could use them with their clients. Well, I recently decided that these books shouldn’t be hidden in a cabinet any longer! So, I am working on making them digital and available to all via Teachers Pay Teachers. I am having a blast putting these books into digital form and as I am doing this, I am reminded of the beneficial skills that can be developed using books with visual language and text and repetitive lines. In this blog I wanted to specifically highlight the benefits of using visual language and text.

Children who are pre-literate can benefit greatly from language and text within books that is visual or picture-based, rather than print only. Pre-literate children can include toddlers or preschoolers or an older child with learning disabilities or cognitive impairments. Whatever their age, visual representation of language and text can help children gain both emergent literacy and language skills. Visual representation can be accomplished by pairing picture symbols with printed words within a book. The entire text of a book can be written with picture symbols or picture symbols can be placed throughout the book to highlight key concepts or specific vocabulary. Picture symbols can easily be added by using Boardmaker ® , Clipart, images from the internet, etc.

Picture based text allows children to more easily attach meaning to words through the picture representations. This also allows children to identify the words within text so they can start “reading” along sooner. Pretending to read a book is a developmental milestone in emergent literacy and the quicker we can get children to do this, the better! However, children with language delays, cognitive impairments and AAC communicators are often delayed in their ability to perform this skill due to difficulty learning language, print concepts or simply due to their inability to maintain attention to joint book reading. Let’s help them develop this important skill by making text visual!

Other emergent literacy skills that can be fostered through pairing pictures with text include: print awareness, print concepts, and phonological awareness. Letters are abstract and don’t always grab the attention of young children or children with delayed language. Pairing a picture with the text can draw their attention to the printed word which provides more opportunities to teach concepts such as word boundaries, print correspondence to speech, understanding that we read from left to right and top to bottom, letter sound correspondence, and so much more! Additionally, language skills galore will grow, especially vocabulary and utterance length and complexity.

Are you motivated yet to start pairing pictures with text? You should be! Get inspired to adapt your favorite books by embedding picture representation. Print off some picture symbols and attach to pages to highlight key concepts or vocabulary you are teaching. “Re-write” some of your favorite books with picture symbols and attach the visual text to the book. Or, get creative and write your own books! If you want to get started right away, check out our simple theme-based books ready for you to download on TPT.