assignment

6.1 Visual Literacy in the Prereading Stage: Seeing the World and the Self

Unlike hearing, the sense of vision does not develop before birth. In fact, it takes an entire year for babies to acquire a mature sense of vision, which means that the right experiences at the right time can make a real difference. Fortunately, most of these experiences rely on biological processes that occur naturally and don't require specific types of stimuli, but it is important to be aware of these normal processes in order to detect problems early. In terms of developing visual literacy, however, it is also important to understand the psychoanalytic importance of vision as well as the biological sense so that we have a complex understanding of the importance of image in a developing child's life.

At birth, babies don't see well at all. In fact, their focal length is only about 8 inches, which is typically how close a mother or other caregiver holds them while feeding or cuddling. You can see how elegant this design is if you consider the wealth of visual information that surrounds us on a daily basis. Imagine how chaotic and over stimulating the world would be to new babies if they could see it all! By only being able to really see the faces and things closest to them, they can shut out extraneous stimuli until their brains are sufficiently developed to cope with and categorize the vast amount of visual content in a single environment.

The blurriness of their vision may also help us understand what psychoanalysts believe is characteristic of early experience. Freud and his followers theorized that infants experience the world as an extension of themselves. Chapter 5 referred to the dual relation between the mother and the child in the fourth trimester; if babies can't clearly see the distinctions between themselves and other people and things, they probably don't have a clear sense of boundaries between themselves and the objects that touch them. This sense that they are not separate and alone but part of the world at large lays the foundation for a sense of trust and belonging.

Books like Mem Fox's Time for Bed (1993) and Denise Fleming's Sleepy, Oh So Sleepy (2010) visually reinforce this sense of belonging by featuring baby animals snuggled close to their parents in environments especially suited for them. While these books are deeply invested in Erikson's initial stage of trust vs. distrust for children under 2 years old, older preschool children benefit from the reminder of their connectedness to loved ones and the world, especially at night or before a nap, when they will be alone. A book that features a similar visual message for older children (4 and up) is Joyce Carol Thomas's Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea (1995). Floyd Cooper's illustrations in this book emphasize the family's connections to each other and to their natural environment. Even though children's vision after about 4 months old is no longer blurry, unconscious memories of that time created by illustrations where characters blend in with their pictorial worlds provide strength and comfort by evoking a sense of belonging.

Visual Development in the First 6 Months

Babies also literally cannot see what's in front of them, especially for the first two months. Rather, because of the immature development of the physical features of the eye, they can see only what is on the edges of their visual field. We call this peripheral vision. Again, consider the way a baby is held while being fed. The bottle or breast is right in front of their nose, but the mother's or caregiver's face is off to the side, so they are able to see it better there than if the mother was holding them face to face.

Babies can recognize their mother's face from a few hours after birth, and they do prefer it over other faces, but they are also generally better at seeing a slowly moving face (a face that's talking or singing to them) than a stationary one. They can track slow movement of an object, especially if it starts in their peripheral vision, though they tend to lose it when it passes directly in front of their eyes. Babies also have trouble seeing things unless they contrast highly with their background. Researchers speculate that this is why babies can see faces—the parts of the face such as eyes, brows, hairlines, and mouths contrast with the skin around them and are more often than not in motion (Eliot, 1999).

What all this means for visual literacy is that, for the first two months anyway, babies are listening to people reading to them, but they are not looking at the book unless that book is full of things they can see, such as high contrast, patterned blocks of color or black and white, held off to the side but still close to the baby's eyes. Babies at this age also become bored with visual stimuli fairly quickly and are attracted to new stimuli rather than things they have seen before, with the exception, of course, of family faces.

Right at 2 months, however, babies' eye apparatuses have developed to the point where they can stare straight ahead and for a brief time can't do anything else. This phenomenon is called "obligatory looking" because the baby appears to be unable to exercise any control over her eye movements (Eliot, 1999, p. 215). This compulsion to stare fixedly at whatever is in front of the baby's sight line is great for bonding with a parent or sibling who is gazing back at the baby, but not so great if the stimuli is painful, like a bright light, so it's something to take advantage of but also to be on the lookout for.

Between the ages of 3 and 6 months, babies regain the ability to control their eye movement, and now it's even better than before. Now they can not only track objects but they start to be able to anticipate the path of the object, looking a little ahead of it as it moves. This is a significant development, because it indicates that babies can now choose where they want to look. From this point forward, visual acuity develops rapidly; the blurriness recedes, and babies are able to focus on things that are farther away.

Growth in acuity continues until a child is 5 years old, but the most marked development occurs during the first six months if there are no problems such as congenital cataracts, a clouding that can obstruct the passage of light, or strabismus, which is a condition in which the eyes are not aligned with each other, preventing them from focusing on the same point in space. By 3 months old, normally developing babies can see all of the basic color distinctions that adults can, and with the growth in acuity comes a higher degree of contrast sensitivity, which means that babies can begin to see less saturated shades of color such as pastels, though they still prefer highly saturated colors until they are 8 or 9 years old (Winner, 1982, p. 139). Interestingly, 4-month-olds actually begin developing what's known as hyperacuity, which is an ability to notice detail at a level that should not be possible given the physical properties of the eye but helps explain why young children are so sensitive to small details in pictures that adults usually screen out as unimportant. While 4 months old is probably too early to bring on the Where's Waldo? books, it is certainly time to share board books with high-contrast, high-interest illustrations, such as Vicky Ceelen's captivating photo books of baby/animal doubles (Baby! Baby!, 2008; Baby Nose to Baby Toes, 2009) or The Global Fund for Children's colorful Global Babies (2006).

The ability to see in 3-D also develops in the first four months of life. In a baby's first few months, input from each eye is channeled separately and competes for space within the baby's brain. If the competition is fair, that is, if both eyes are capable of seeing equally well, then the visual cortex develops an equal amount of space for processing the input for each eye, and then it recombines the input to produce a binocular, or three-dimensional, effect. If something goes wrong during the critical period of development, however, due to strabismus or some other interference, then binocular vision is permanently disabled. In some ways, however, this helps explain a child's ability to recognize two-dimensional drawings, such as icons, as representations of three-dimensional objects. The path of development indicates that parts of our brains are prewired for two-dimensional viewing and that while we develop the capacity for three-dimensional vision, the new system doesn't entirely replace the old.

In terms of sharing books with infants, then, the principles that we discussed in Chapter 3 are relevant here: Babies respond best to high-contrast, brightly colored images that are either two-dimensional or photographic in their representation. They crave patterns early, because their brains are developing their visual centers and patterns help establish neural pathways that are relevant to their cultural experience. For instance, studies have shown that children who lived in "carpentered" environments—that is, houses or apartments—are more sensitive to horizontal and vertical angles, while children reared in a traditional Canadian Indian village where the families live in teepees have a greater visual awareness of diagonal lines (Annis & Frost, 1973). This demonstrates how experience with visual culture makes a difference in how we see, and argues for enrichment of the visual space in order to develop an expansive visual literacy.

Vision and the Development of a Sense of Self

Vision is also vitally important in terms of developing a sense of self. Indeed, Freudian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan proposed that our understanding of self is predominantly a result of interaction with visual images (2006). Somewhere between the ages of 6 and 18 months, babies recognize themselves in a mirror. This marks an important time in a baby's life that Lacan called the "mirror stage." As we've discussed, babies don't quite have a sense that the various parts of their bodies are wholly theirs, and they don't quite understand where their body stops and the rest of the world starts. Thus they experience the mother's body or their blanket as an extension of their own bodies. When they recognize themselves in the mirror, a significant change takes place in their self-understanding. The image they see in the mirror does in fact seem whole and complete, and, because of their visual development, it's no longer blurry. It has complete boundaries and is a separate being.

Most importantly, though, the baby in the mirror seems competent and independent. Whereas, for instance, a baby might hit herself in the head accidentally because she lacks fully competent motor control, the baby in the mirror appears to be moving its parts intentionally, more like the others the baby has been observing for the past several months. So the baby is very excited to discover herself in the mirror, because that baby in the mirror is much more like the others the baby sees than she is like the self she feels herself to be. Of course there is a great deal of speculation involved in this theoretical model because babies can't tell us what they feel or think, but Lacan's speculations about infants are borne out by the way we continue to use mirror images for the rest of our lives. We often use mirrors to check what we look like, how we appear, regardless of how we actually feel.

Lacan also stresses that the recognition of the baby in the mirror as the self requires an identification with the image; that baby over there is somehow the same as "me" over here. Books with mirrors in them most often reinforce this identification through the use of identifying words; they will show a series of objects before they show a mirror and indicate to the baby (through the person reading to him or her) that the mirror image is the baby. This is, of course, both true and not true; the baby in the mirror is an image of the baby. But the baby is fascinated by that image, and, like adult dancers or fitness trainers, he uses that mirror image to self-correct, to organize movements, to see if what the facial expression or gesture feels like is in fact what it looks like. Physical and occupational therapy environments for special needs children often make full use of this fascination by lining the lower walls with mirrors so that children get visual reinforcement for their actions; this technique would be useful for classroom design for neurotypical children as well. Once children recognize the image, they come to rely on it even more than they rely on what their bodies are telling them. Mirror images help them feel stable and continuous even if their bodies aren't cooperating. They use their mirror images as models for what they feel and how they see themselves and others. According to Lacan, this sets a mental structure in place; from then on, babies (and adults) use images more than sensual experience to organize their world and their sense of self.

We can synthesize this way of thinking about development with Erik Erikson's stage model. As discussed in earlier chapters, Erikson identified the first stage of psychosocial development as one of developing trust in the environment and the caregivers. This sense of trust is reinforced through consistent care, touch, and vocal reassurances. Once trust has been established, however, the baby experiences a growing need for autonomy and independence according to Erikson's stage model. This corresponds to Lacan's idea that the baby is attracted to the seeming independence and self-control of the baby in the mirror. It also corresponds to what we have discussed about the physical ability of the baby to move away from the mother, separation anxiety, and the ability to represent an absent object with a mental image and a word. In Lacan's articulation of the mirror stage, the baby's first sense of autonomy is found in the visual image.

Erikson places this stage at around 2–3 years, and contrasts autonomy with shame—that is, the project of children in this developmental stage is to get control over their bodies and achieve an early sense of independence, and if they can't, they experience shame and self-doubt. The problem, of course, is that bodies are hard to get control of, and hence the image, which appears to be in control, is much more attractive than the body the child is struggling to master.

The result, according to Lacan, is that we start to develop our identity by relying more on images than on our own feelings. This has huge implications for visual literacy. Children's literature researchers have emphasized for years that children need to "see themselves in books," because if they don't, they feel devalued by mainstream culture and invisible (Chall, Radwin, French, & Hall, 1979; Larrick, 1965; Sims, 1982). Underlying this assumption is the psychic structure that we have just described; it isn't just in the mirror that we look for images to identify or disidentify with, but everywhere. Babies love to look at books that feature other babies because those babies are models for imitation, and they help shore up a baby's developing sense of self. But their visual acuity means that they are sensitive to skin color and facial features, so it is important to use books that feature a diverse set of baby models. These babies will also provide models for action and the expression of emotions. They expand the realm of possibility for actions and emotions as well. As adults point out facial expressions and gestures to the baby and code them with words that represent them, they reinforce the structure of personal identification with representations in books, an important literacy skill to develop.

As children grow older, their developmental needs evolve to include images of children engaging in activities that they can imitate, as well as stories that excite their imaginations and expand their possibilities for pretend play and personal identification. As they move into Erikson's third stage of initiative vs. guilt (around 3–5 years old), they engage in the kinds of imaginative play that makes them feel powerful. They might play "house," for instance, so that they get the chance to decide what's for dinner and when it's time for bed, or they might go further afield and play at occupations or fantasy quests.

The books they need and prefer at this stage show child characters behaving more independently and playing with power. For instance, Mini Grey's Traction Man character, who is featured in three books so far (Traction Man Is Here, 2005; Traction Man Meets Turbo Dog, 2008; and Traction Man and the Beach Odyssey, 2012), shows the kind of imaginative play a child can engage in with an action figure and ordinary household objects. Picturebook presentations of folk tales, such as Julius Lester's and Jerry Pinkney's Sam and the Tigers: A Retelling of Little Black Sambo (1996) are also popular at this age as they often show less-powerful characters overcoming obstacles. Finally, domestic stories of common problems, such as those confronted by Russell Hoban's Frances (Bedtime for Frances, 1960; A Birthday for Frances, 1968; Bread and Jam for Frances, 1964) and Lauren Child's Charlie and Lola (I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato, 2000; I Am Not Sleepy and I Will Not Go to Bed, 2001; I Am Absolutely Too Small for School, 2003) are appealing because they help children see that their situations, such as not wanting to go to bed, coping with jealous or anxious feelings, establishing food preferences, and so forth, are not unique.

Goals, Methods, and Materials for Promoting Visual Literacy

As young children become more experienced with visual representations of people, places, and things, different elements of a picture will take on meaning. This is where conversation with adults is key. Using the knowledge of how pictures work, adults can talk with children about how they read the pictures—what they see, how they feel about what they see, and why they feel that way.

As we noted in Chapter 5, it is important to pay attention to what and how children like to play. You will want to then find books that represent those activities so that children understand that books are places where they can find things they like. Concept books are especially important at this stage, because children are not only learning about themselves, but they are also amassing a huge amount of visual information about the world, and they are discerning enough to detect even small differences, which will help them with the abstract skill of categorizing as well as the important visual literacy skill of differentiation among details.

Hand in hand with viewing visual materials is creating them. Provide children with a range of artistic materials and the support they need to use them, paying attention to developmental abilities. Very young children, for instance, can work with edible "paints" such as chocolate or butterscotch pudding, although all materials should be nontoxic. Encourage children to imitate their favorite pictures—don't worry that this will stifle their creativity. Imitation, after all, is the first way we learn anything, with innovation coming after. As children grow older, expand the kinds of art materials they have access to so that they can experiment with collage art, colored pencils, chalk, and paints in imitation of their favorite picturebook artists.

As adults share books with very young children, then, there are certain goals to keep in mind with regard to visual literacy in the prereading stage. As with audio and linguistic literacy at this stage, the goal is not so much to push children into early recognition of print, although distinguishing between the symbols that carry writing and the pictures will likely happen along the way. Instead, the goals have to do with helping children develop visual acuity, that is, strengthening their attention to pictorial detail (although it will likely be far better than yours, so it's unclear who will be teaching whom!), pattern recognition, and culturally informed color meanings.

You are also sensitizing them to the visual codes and values of their culture, so it is important to include a range of diverse images. This does not mean you reject a book that includes characters of only one race or ethnicity or that features mothers in aprons. Instead, the important thing is the range and aggregate of visual literacy experiences, so pay close attention to the images across the range of books you share, making sure you include books with characters of all ethnicities and genders, as well as positive portrayals of children with disabilities. Different artistic styles are also important to introduce at this stage, as this is when young children are absorbing and storing the visual images they will work with as they engage with texts that paint word pictures rather than illustrated texts.

Teaching Ideas: Visual Literacy

Classroom Design

Create zones in your space that are organized by color.

Minimize visual clutter.

Introduce a shape and then have children find examples of that shape throughout the environment.

Have a class mascot—a small, colorful figure that is cut out and laminated. Put the figure in a different place each day, and give a small prize to the child who finds it first.

Place interesting visual materials at different eye levels around the space. For instance, place the panels for a sequential story on the wall at crawling height.

Play the DVDs of BBC's Planet Earth and Frozen Planet, without sound, in a corner of the room. The stunning visuals will captivate young viewers who are interested in the natural world.

Look at a few of the books from Joseph Slate's and Ashley Wolff's Miss Bindergarten series. Look closely at the classroom design and the types of activities that are depicted, and draw ideas from these illustrations.

Visual Activities

Play visual discrimination games, such as those found here:

http://www.eyecanlearn.com/

http://barbarasmithoccupationaltherapist.com/visualperceptual.html

http://www.ehow.com/video_4403215_teaching-visual-discrimination -montessori.html

Use simple patterns at snack time—an apple slice, a piece of cheese, an apple slice, a piece of cheese on a plate. Have children create the pattern and position the food.

Encourage sorting tasks—small objects, types of toys.

Provide lots of books with differing artistic styles. Talk about the illustrations as you share the story. Never rush through a reading; instead, invite lingering over illustrations and attention to detail. Listen to the children and practice shared attention.

Encourage imitation of artwork. Provide a range of art supplies and encourage experimentation.

Lead children through visualization exercises to develop their "inner eye." Have them close their eyes and remember their bedrooms from that morning. What did they see when they woke up? What color are their pajamas? Their sheets? What toys do they have in their room? This activity can also be done after you have read the children a story—have them close their eyes and lead them through remembering details from the book.

6.2 Gestural Literacy in the Prereading Stage: Physical Expressions of Meaning

For children who are reared by deaf parents or those who have a disability that will interfere with oral language development, gesture is essential to literacy acquisition. The features of American Sign Language (ASL)—that is, its vocabulary and grammar—develop in much the same way as oral language does for hearing children. That is, children absorb the language used in their environment, and, given rich interaction with adults and siblings, develop a natural facility with the structure and use of the language that is then somewhat compromised by the introduction of metalinguistic awareness, as we noted in Chapter 5.

It is a good thing for all children to learn a few signs as early as possible, for two reasons. First, young children understand more than they can say. Their receptive vocabulary (words they understand) is more advanced than their expressive vocabulary (words they can say), and motor development and gestural control precede the ability to produce verbal language, so sign language can serve as a bridge to prevent the frustration of not being understood. I remember when a friend called one day and asked me to teach her daughter the sign for "finished," because she had taken to clearing her high chair tray with a dramatic swoop when she didn't want any more food; mom was tired of cleaning cereal off the walls and ready for her daughter to have a more controlled communication option!

A second reason for learning signs is that it adds to children's understanding that concepts, ideas, and emotions can be symbolized and expressed in multiple ways. Just as children learn that words and pictures can represent objects, activities, and emotions, they need to understand that gestures not only perform actions but also represent them. Several years later, then, they might read independently a passage like this from Alvin Ho: Allergic to Girls, School, and Other Scary Things:

Then my dad opened the box.

His whistling stopped.

His breathing stopped.

His feet stopped.

Then he staggered backward.

"WHAAAAAAAAAAT IS THIS?" he wailed. "Johnny Astro, what happened to you?" he cried.

Then he really cried. He put his head in his hands, and his shoulders went up and down. (Look, 2008, pp. 90–91)

With a strong sense of gestural literacy, children can get a true sense of just how upset Alvin's father is by the way he uses his body. When you stop whistling, you might be sort of upset. When your breathing stops and you stagger backward, it's much worse. But when you cry and your shoulders move up and down, you are not just a little upset; you are sobbing. Understanding that gestures communicate feelings and actions enables children to picture scenes as they read them and feel the emotions of the characters along with them. In fact, being able to read and understand the language of gestures is one of the strongest ways to create empathy, which is a crucial skill for building relationships and developing personal character as well as becoming a strong reader (Keen, 2010).

There are many books on sign language for babies readily available in the child care section of the bookstore, but the most useful signs to begin with are the ones for "eat," "more," and "finished." Useful, everyday signs can be found at this website by clicking on the dictionary and typing in the word you want: http://lifeprint.com/. Teaching sign language to babies is accomplished simply by accompanying the activity itself and your verbal expression of the word with the sign every time you use it. Interestingly, studies have shown that early signing actually improves verbal fluency when children do begin to speak, possibly because they have been using an accessible form of expressive communication all along.

Learning the Meanings of Facial Expressions and Body Movements

Gestural literacy is not limited to signing. In fact, we all use gestures as a natural part of our communication; facial expression, hand gestures, eye movements, nods and head shaking or tilting are all gestures that are integral to communicating our meaning. As children grow in their social environment, they learn to read and reproduce these gestures. They also have to learn what gestures and body movements are socially appropriate in various settings. As with language development, adults and siblings provide models, direct instruction, and feedback during the learning process, and children test their gestures and adapt them according to the responses they receive.

Gestural literacy is important when it comes to understanding visual information and making inferences from print texts. For instance, in Anthony Browne's How Do You Feel? (2011), the character demonstrates a range of feelings. In each picture, Browne changes the colors, body postures, and size of the character to provide a visual representation of a feeling. For instance, when the character is happy, the colors are bright with high contrast, and the character is shown in a wide-legged, open-armed stance. The pocket on his overalls is even shaped into a smile with buttons for eyes. By contrast, when the character is scared, his pant legs are outlined with jiggly lines, and his arms are pulled close to his body. These body postures and colors, accompanied by a word that describes the feeling, produce a montage that forms an association and creates meaning. When I am happy, I feel expansive, wide open, and big; but when I am scared, I feel small, closed in, and shaky.

Learning these codes of visual and gestural style is both a biological and a social achievement. It's biological because our bodies respond to situations in physical ways. For instance, when we have to give a performance, many of us experience stage fright. We literally shake with fear. This is because our muscles want to contract—to regress into a fetal position that protects our body from perceived outside threats. When we force them not to do this, the muscles contract involuntarily with the effort, and we shake as a result. When children are extremely happy, they are likely to express it physically by jumping up and down, which is another way to release nervous energy.

Learning these visual and gestural codes is also a social and cultural achievement because we mirror postures that we see as expressing meaning. Two-year-olds mug for the camera in specific ways because they have learned the codes of picture-taking from watching others and looking at pictures. Children pretending to be monsters do so in very stylized and remarkably similar ways, considering that monsters are imaginary and thus could take on any number of postures. So gestural style is a combination of innate and learned behaviors, and these behaviors assist literacy development in two ways: (a) by being an expression of meaning all by themselves, and (b) by enabling children to infer meaning from the suggestion of gestures in print and visual representations.

Gesture's Role in Establishing Rituals

Another crucial aspect of gestural literacy is its role in creating a sense of ritual. So much of human activity takes place in a ritual format—domestic habits of dining together and preparing for bed, waiting in line, communal gathering and listening, playing on teams, going to church—that much of parenting and schooling involves teaching children to participate in and adjust to the patterns of ritual behavior. In ritual, we must attune our bodies to others participating in the ritual activity. This creates a sense of community and helps soothe anxiety, because our own emotional states are regulated, mirrored, and affirmed by the presence of others sharing those emotional states.

Parents, caregivers, and educators facilitate participation in rituals by teaching young children songs, chants, and action rhymes; by establishing a time and place for reading; and by adopting a reading voice (which is noticeably different from a getting-ready voice or a playing voice or a I've-just-about-had-it voice). These special uses of gesture and language require that children adjust their movements, rhythms, and volume so that they are in step with others, or in the case of personal rituals, in step with a preestablished pattern. Researchers believe that this attunement is one of the reasons why we engage in ritual in the first place, because it relieves stress by regulating our bodies and hearkening back to the sense of communicative musicality and connectedness we felt with our early caregivers (Dissanayake, 2009; Eckerdal&Merker, 2009).

One of the most important aspects of the ritual of reading together is the development of joint attention, as we discussed in Chapter 1. Joint attention is facilitated by pointing, which, surprisingly enough, is a gesture most babies can do very early, although parents don't likely recognize it until they are looking for it. But pointing is essential for the development of language as well as other aspects of literacy development, such as learning that things can be represented in different ways. For instance, pointing to a picture of a baby's nose while saying "nose" and touching the baby's nose, encodes three registers— the image, the sound, and the touch—for the concept of nose. Soon enough, the baby will come to realize that the sound "nose" refers to a picture of noses and the baby's own nose, and this will set the stage for understanding that the letters n-o-s-e are yet another way of referring to the same concept.

Goals, Methods, and Materials for Promoting Gestural Literacy

Because children are natural mimics, gestural literacy can be modeled, pointed out, and discussed, rather than taught through direct instruction. Most well-illustrated storybooks that feature characters offer an opportunity to discuss gestures and what they look like. The most explicit instruction for the children's own gestural literacy will likely come through negative feedback, where children are told not to behave in a certain way in a certain place or time. In most settings, though, children will take on the behaviors of those around them. For instance, if children sit with their parents in church, they will eventually learn to sit and stand at the appropriate times, sing when others sing, and remain quiet when others are quiet. A similar pattern of routines develops in classrooms as well.

It is important, though, that gestural literacy be intentionally used to enhance communication and ritual behavior. This is where dramatic play comes in. Acting out stories is not only great fun but it helps develop cooperative behaviors and planning skills; and it encourages literacy skills such as fluency, character understanding, and story arcs.

Teaching Ideas: Gestural Literacy

Reading Aloud

Overemphasize your own gestures when reading or telling a story—be a ham!

When reading, point to objects and encourage children to point so that they can develop the skill of shared attention.

Talk about pictures of characters in books. Ask how the character is feeling and how the children know how he is feeling from the picture.

Have children imitate the gesture of a character in a book, and ask how they feel while they are doing it. Remind them that this is how the character must feel as well.

Games, Action Rhymes, and Finger Plays

Increase your repertoire of action rhymes and finger plays to teach to children. The upcoming list "Recommended Books: Professional Resources for Storytimes and Action Rhymes" suggests a few sources.

Play Feelings Charades: Whisper a feeling to a child and have that child act out that feeling while the other children guess what the feeling is. Alternately, have them act out an action, such as eating an apple or swimming. Later in the year, once you have shared many books with them, have them act out a character from a book you have read.

Play the Pass-It-On game: Arrange children in a circle. Have them pass an imaginary object from one person to another, imagining how it would feel—a hot potato, a baby, a porcupine, a heavy object. When each child has had a turn passing the object, call out, or have the children call out, a new object to pass.

Play the Mirror game: Divide children up in pairs. One of each pair is the mirror. The mirror has to imitate the actions and expressions of the partner. After a few minutes, have children switch roles.

Dance and Drama

Have free dance time every day. Use different types of music, and make sure you join in the dancing. Don't worry about looking silly.

Invite community dancers in to demonstrate and teach their skills. Alternately, call a dance school and ask if you can visit the studio. Dance schools will often offer a free class for a day care since they are usually not busy during the day.

Stage a play. This may seem ambitious, but it's really quite doable for preschoolers. Have the children choose a story, and then decide what characters, costumes, and props they will need. Ask for volunteers for parts. Since they are not yet readers, you may choose to narrate, or the children could provide their own dialogue. Practice, practice, practice, and encourage them to reflect on and critique their performance, thinking about how they could make it better. Then invite parents in for the performance!

Photo Book of Facial Expressions

Have children make a list of emotions: surprise, anger, happiness, sadness, confusion, etc. Then have them experiment with making faces to show these emotions. Take digital photos of their faces making the expressions, and put them in a book.

6.3 Tactile Literacy in the Prereading Stage: Expanding the Sensual Field

Tactile literacy encompasses the senses of touch, taste, and smell, all of which have both biological and cultural components. As with gestural literacy, babies and young children need experiences in each of these areas in order to produce mental representations that enable them to establish their perception of their own bodies and a full understanding of the world that surrounds them. Rich sensory experience creates mental models that children can then re-imagine through words alone, a process essential to being a strong reader.

The sense of touch is not only crucial to young children's well-being, it's also one of their most well-developed senses at birth (Eliot, 1999). Touch refers to four distinct sensations: (a) the feeling that something is in contact with your skin, (b) temperature, (c) pain, and (d) proprioception, which is the ability to feel your body in space, both in terms of position and movement. Interestingly, for babies, touch is closely related to vision; in the first few months of life, vision alone isn't well-developed enough for babies to fully understand three-dimensional objects or images of them, so they touch them in order to see them. Additionally, it's important to know that infants' touch sensitivity is sharper in their mouths than in their hands. This is why everything they can access, including books, goes straight to babies' mouths, and why special books, such as board books, cloth books, and books made of waterproof vinyl are created to accommodate this sort of soggy exploration.

By 9 months of age, most children have successfully mastered the pincer grasp, which will enable them to turn pages successfully. However, their control of their large and small muscle groups is not that precise, so board books are best for infants' independent exploration. As noted previously, they will point to things that are interesting to them, and the reward of various textures in touch-and-feel books, such as Kunhardt's Pat the Bunny (1940) will encourage them to linger and explore. This exploration is extremely important to brain development. Studies conducted with rats show that when rats are given new toys to explore through touch, their cerebral cortexes thicken, with the result that these rats reared in enriched environments were demonstrably cleverer than rats reared in ordinary environments (Diamond, 1990). As the rats become accustomed to their toys, they grow disinterested and their cortexes begin to shrink. The lesson for developing tactile literacy to be drawn from this experiment is that children need novel sensory experiences to encourage brain development. Going to the library once a week to get a new selection of board books, and introducing books that have interesting features for children to explore, such as textures to touch, pull-tabs, and lift-the-flap features will help stimulate not only an interest in books but also encourage growth in the cerebral cortex.

Book apps for tablets and other devices also offer opportunities for tactile stimulation since the kinds of touch children use create different effects. Pop Out! The Tale of Peter Rabbit, an app by Loud Crow Interactive, Inc., for instance, requires a child to swipe a finger along a simulated tab at the bottom of the screen to move the bunny in the picture or touch various pictures on the screen to create different effects. Other apps for very young children activate features by having the child shake or tilt the device. In an ironic reversal, the children's book Press Here (2011) by Hervé Tullet imitates an app by directing children to press on dots on the page, which then change with the page turn, simulating the interactivity of an electronic device. Children enjoy this book enormously until they learn the secret—that the dots will change whether they follow the directions or not. This realization represents a growth in intelligence—and indicates that it's time to move on to more stimulating fare.

Taste and smell are represented in books rather than directly stimulated by them, although children who spend a lot of time in bookstores and libraries do develop a strong associative response to the smell of books. Although infants react to smells by turning away from unpleasant ones and turning toward familiar or pleasant ones, this sense of discrimination is not fully developed until they are 3 years old and is closely linked to familiarity and culture. Thus, what one child learns to experience as a good smell may be "yucky" to another child. Strong smells in a book, whether good or bad, are often indicated visually through the use of a tornado-shaped swirl emanating from the source of the smell. This helps children understand the way smells, which are invisible, start from a particular source and travel through the air.

Books for young children often feature food, because food is central to human experience. Through nonfiction, children can learn about what foods different animals eat, cultural differences in foodways, and the kinds of foods that are associated with celebrations, such as cake and ice cream. Thematically, food is often associated with either love or power, as when Stellaluna must learn to eat bugs rather than the luscious fruit her mother used to give her, or when Max is sent to his room without supper and then returns after his wild rumpus to find that his mother has left warm food for him. Picky eaters like Russell Hoban's Frances and Lauren Child's Lola, as well as Sam-I-Am's companion in Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham (1960), must all learn to try new foods.

Goals, Methods, and Materials for Promoting Tactile Literacy

As with all of the literacies in the prereading stage, the important thing is to enrich the preschoolers' range of sensory experiences so that they will be able to use their mental models to imagine the worlds that words create. Your goal in developing tactile literacies at this stage is to create strong links between the stories you read to children and the senses these stories depend on and evoke.

Teaching Ideas: Tactile Literacy

Classroom Activities

Regularly introduce new textured and movable books to children. Infants to 2-year-olds will enjoy board books and touch-and-feel books; 2–3-year-olds should be introduced to books with simple mechanisms such as pull-tabs, wheels, and lift-the-flap features. Older preschoolers will appreciate pop-up books.

When a book includes food as part of the story, have samples available for the children to taste (check with the parents for allergies first, of course). For instance, share strawberries after reading Don Wood's The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear (1984), or have available various foods from Lois Ehlert's Eating the Alphabet: Fruits and Vegetables From A to Z (1996). Encourage the children to describe the tastes of the food, and introduce strong vocabulary words from the books to help them develop their taste words.

Create a smell center. Dip Q-tips in essential oils (available at cake decorating and health food stores) and place them in labeled zip-top baggies. When a book mentions a smell, such as cinnamon, peppermint, or vanilla, have the appropriate scented Q-tip available for the children. Teach them the technique of holding the Q-tip a hand-width away from their nose and waving the smell toward their nose rather than smelling the Q-tip directly.

Introduce nontraditional foods at snack time (again, check for allergies). If they can be persuaded to try them, children often enjoy frozen peas, kale chips, seaweed, banana chips, dried fruits and vegetables, and so forth. Have them describe the tastes using strong vocabulary words. Take pictures of their test faces and put them in a book with appropriate labels.

Each day, register the temperature and use a visual aid to indicate what sort of outerwear children should wear for that temperature.

Field Trips

Take preschoolers to various restaurants for tours and tastings. Explain to the owner that you want to introduce the children to new tastes and smells, and ask for his or her help in creating such experiences.

Visit an orchard or a market with lots of fruits and vegetables. Explain to the owner beforehand that you want each child to taste a fruit or vegetable that they have never had before. Take pictures of the various vegetables; and create a book that includes color words, taste words, touch words, and smell words to describe each fruit or vegetable.

6.4 Spatial Literacy in the Prereading Stage: Understanding the Environment

Of all the literacy types, spatial literacy may be the one most compromised by the digital revolution. Children learning to read 30 or 40 years ago brought with them a wealth of embodied knowledge about their environment that today's children are less likely to have. That is, with only three network TV channels, no personal computers or gaming devices, and more personal freedom and encouragement to play outside, children mapped their environment into the fantasy spaces that have now been replicated for them on the screen. Now, instead of walking the neighborhood, finding and claiming secret spaces, and making up elaborate role-playing games with the kids in the community, children are more likely to have their avatars do their walking on a screen while the only thing their bodies are doing is moving their fingers. Their activities and games are more likely to be scripted and organized by adults and confined to areas designed for specific purposes and safety, leaving them less opportunity to self-regulate and figure out how to negotiate potentially dangerous landscapes for themselves. However, the structures of our imaginations don't change as quickly as our culture does, so the need for spatial literacy is still pertinent.

But how much does embodied knowledge matter to the development of spatial literacy in a digital age? That's a good question, and all of its answers are embedded in personal ideologies and belief systems. For instance, a prevalent concern today is the environment. Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (2005), makes a strong argument, richly supported by lots of research, that our children's education must include more open access to unstructured natural environments not only for their cognitive and emotional development but also for the development of an attitude of healthy stewardship for nature. For children who do not have easy access to natural environments, the lush visual presentations of the natural world in the BBC Life and Planet Earth series offer an opportunity to explore places, at least visually. Their sense of wonder with regard to the natural world may be activated virtually, rather than through time spent in the woods.

Another argument for enabling children to learn to navigate the physical world is that this kind of exploration teaches children the affordances (the quality of an object that allows or requires a person to perform an action, like twisting a knob or pulling on a door) of a space as well as the affordances of their own changing body. Once a child is mobile, the best thing parents can do is child-proof the house as well as they can and let the child explore. The mix of freedom and safety applies to the outside environment as well: Knowing which spaces are safe and which should be avoided, and how to get from one place to another in their own neighborhood are important for children no matter whether that neighborhood is rural, urban, or suburban.

Children are naturally attracted to environmental spaces that have been designed specifically for them. Architects and landscape designers pay attention to children's size, needs, and preferences when they design playspaces, classrooms, and other environments, and educators and parents should too. For instance, putting safe things, such as plastic containers and pots and pans, in low cupboards that babies and toddlers can open is great for their sense of discovery and empowerment. These become like real-life "lift-the-flap" books, and help instill a sense of curiosity in children. The notion that looking deeper into something pays off is what drives scientific discovery after all, and this curiosity, which Freud called the "drive to know," can be encouraged or discouraged in childhood depending on the way adults respond to children's desire to explore. On the other hand, barriers should be used to cordon off spaces that may be dangerous for children.

If we consider that the purpose of playgrounds is to help children learn to negotiate a world that was not designed for them by learning to perform in a world that is, we can analyze what sorts of spatial knowledge we currently think children benefit from. For instance, there are always climbing structures. These structures require balance, bilateral coordination, decision making based on a conception of distance and weight distribution, and strength. Swings involve coordinated movement and produce a pleasant feeling of rhythm and weightlessness. Swaying bridges encourage balance while walking on unsteady ground.

In terms of literacy skills, knowing with your body what these things feel like enables the imaginative reproduction of those feelings when they are described or depicted in books. It is much more difficult to have a rich literary experience when you are unable to relate to what it feels like to be in the same physical state as the character. But the play space also demonstrates that these activities needn't be exactly the same in order to appreciate the expansion provided by the book. For instance, the swaying feeling you remember from being on the playground bridge will get you started toward understanding the tension a character feels trying to get across a raging waterfall on a rope bridge, while the carefully chosen words take you the rest of the way in your imagination. So while spatial literacy helps you negotiate your actual landscape, it can enrich your imaginative one as well.

Another aspect of spatial literacy is the ability to conceptualize objects in space. This is closely related to visual and gestural literacy, and it can be supported through looking at picturebooks that play with design. The reciprocal benefit is that such looking trains the eye to see more accurately.

While interaction with digital media, especially the augmented reality books referred to in Chapter 2, will likely facilitate this development of spatial abilities, we are still left with more questions than answers concerning the effect of an increasingly digital environment on our spatial understanding. For instance, can we understand descriptions of characters traversing difficult landscapes if we ourselves have encountered only digital approximations of those landscapes? How will children's increased screen time affect their understanding of distance and time when they are simultaneously in their chairs in front of their computers and in a virtual world and can put the experience on pause whenever they want? Does turning a box on a screen with a mouse activate the same neural connections as turning that same box in their hands, or only in their imaginations? Research has yet to be done in these areas, so we just don't know.

Goals, Methods, and Materials for Promoting Spatial Literacy

For now, then, the goals for developing spatial literacy depend on a balance between embodied experience and virtual experience, whether that comes through screens or pages. Activities such as working with modeling clay and other three-dimensional media should continue to be a part of the curriculum. But more emphasis will likely need to be placed on getting children outdoors and exploring their environment. Drawing maps of walks and the insides of houses and other buildings and plotting paths through museums and amusement parks using their maps will bridge the physical with its representation. Encouraging children to re-imagine the structured spaces of their environments into the secret spaces of their imaginations will also improve their spatial literacy (see the first teaching idea under Classroom Activities in the following section).

Teaching Ideas: Spatial Literacy

Field Trips

After sharing and talking about a book like Satoshi Kitamura's Lily Takes a Walk (1998), D. B. Johnson's Henry Hikes to Fitchburg (2000), or Kenneth Cole's No Bad News (2001), take a walk around your neighborhood. Point out significant landmarks, such as houses, stores, or trees. Emphasize the path, pointing out the turns and the basic shape of your walk. When you get back, make a map of the walk. Encourage the children to visualize what they saw, and make the map as detailed as possible.

Share a concept book like Joanne Schwartz's City Alphabet (2011) or Stephen T. Johnson's Alphabet City (1999) or City by Numbers (2003). Take a walk, and encourage children to find environmental print like that used in Schwartz's book, or shapes that resemble letters of the alphabet or numbers as in Johnson's books.

Compose a collaborative "walk" poem. A walk poem doesn't have a particular form; it is composed of observations, emotions, and experiences from the walk. Have each child contribute a line that shares their feelings or observations during the walk.

Visit a grocery store and show children the different sections.

Visit children's museums, arboretums, and parks. Make sure you set aside time to talk about the experience with the children before and after your visit.

Classroom Activities

Turn the classroom or playroom into a castle-for-a-day (or a spaceship, a pirate ship, a pyramid, a city block, or an island). Have children list the features of the imaginary space and then decide where they should be and why. Use David Macauley's books for a visual reference. Once the setting has been established, have a relevant book or two to read, and tailor activities and snacks to the space.

Provide art supplies for making three-dimensional objects—clay, pipe cleaners, buttons, beads, nuts and bolts, etc.

Provide constructions supplies—blocks, Legos and Duplos, K'Nex, marble runs, Lincoln Logs, Wedgits, Magnatiles. Encourage children to tell stories when they have finished their creations.

6.5 Multimodal Literacy: Putting It All Together

As noted at the beginning of Chapter 5, it's artificial to separate the various multiliteracies into distinct categories—they all develop together, and they all work together. But knowing how each area works and what to look for developmentally will help you make the best decisions about activities, methods, and materials to choose for the children with whom you work.

As children explore their world through multiliteracies, they become aware that the world can be represented in multiple ways. Piaget (1977) called this the symbolic function, and it emerges when children are around 2 years old. At this age, emotions, for instance, are expressed multimodally—through words, songs, and other sounds, through visual markers such as color, and through gestures and body posture. Children need stories to help them figure out what is socially acceptable and to give them possible ways to cope with the emotions that threaten to overwhelm them.

The symbolic function evolves during the preschool years to enable children to explore their world through fantasy play. Here again, they use language, visual representations, their own bodies, and their spaces to act out their wishes and fears. Those children fortunate enough to have a rich experience with story will have better vocabularies and more expansive image banks from which to draw as they construct their own stories; more input leads to greater and more fluent output. Their ability to tell stories emerges around the third year with support from adults, such as providing storytelling props like puppets, costumes, and playhouses that offer opportunities for embodying story. Often, though, such support means leaving them alone, so they can talk to themselves without being censored or interrupted.

Children between the ages of 1 and 4 are also slowly developing a sense of who they are apart from their mothers. Their fears of separation are addressed in multiple books about babies being separated from their mothers, as we have discussed, and turning out okay. They are learning how to express emotions and name the things in their world. They are separating things into categories so that they can manage a complex world, which is where early concept books and more advanced nonfiction books, such as those we discuss in Chapter 10, can be a great help.

Interestingly, they begin to place themselves in categories as well. Recent research shows that children begin to notice the visual aspects of racial difference as early as 6 months old (Kelly et al, 2007). Starting at age 2, they have an emerging sense of gender. Certainly by the time they enter preschool, they understand the visual and verbal differences between ethnicities and visible disabilities like Down syndrome or other physical differences. It is extremely important, then, that early childhood educators talk about differences among people in ways children can understand.

Often, parents and educators make the mistake of thinking that if children are reared in a multicultural neighborhood or attend a multicultural, inclusive school, their response to skin color and ability differences will take care of themselves as a matter of course. But research shows that this is not the case: Children are attentive to differences among people, and their attitudes about them are formed between the ages of 4 and 7 (Katz, 2003; Paley, 1979; Vittrup, 2007).

During this critical period, then, children need concrete, clear conversation and materials, such as multicultural books, about what these differences mean and don't mean (Bigler, 1999). For instance, parents can highlight the beautiful dark brown skin of a baby or simply comment on the fact that some babies have brown eyes and brown skin, and some babies have blue eyes and pink skin. Likewise, they can point out that mommies can be plumbers or doctors or they can stay at home to take care of their children, and so can daddies. Dentists and teachers can have brown skin or white skin. Vague statements like "all people are equal" don't work because they rely on an abstract idea that children do not understand yet (Bronson & Merryman, 2009). Even worse, though, children can assume that silence about differences in race, gender, or abilities means that these differences are possibly shameful because mommies and daddies won't talk about them.

6.6 Visual Media for Prereaders: Using Screen Time Wisely and Effectively

In 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued the following recommendation:

Pediatricians should urge parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of 2 years. Although certain television programs may be promoted to this age group, research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers (e.g., child care providers) for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills. Therefore, exposing such young children to television programs should be discouraged.

However, electronic media, including television, is becoming more and more ubiquitous in our lives, and most children are exposed to media long before they are 2 years old. Despite the concerns of the AAP, relatively little research has been conducted to test the effects of media on very young children. In 2003 the Kaiser Family Foundation interviewed 1,000 parents of children aged 6 months to 6 years regarding children's access to and use of electronic and print media in the home. (For the full report, see here.) Their findings indicate that preschool children are spending at least as much time watching television per day as they do playing outside and that they are active in selecting, requesting, and manipulating their own media (turning on the TV and using the remote to change channels, putting DVDs in the machine and playing them, and using the computer). Clearly, a new form of literacy and competence is emergent among today's preschoolers that it behooves educators to pay attention to, especially since the tide is not about to turn back to a premediated environment.

For educators, then, one of the benefits of watching children's TV is that it can help us learn how to gain and hold our children's attention. Media programmers have to compete for the attention of children, so they have become experts at it. Designers of children's programming pay a lot of attention to creating visually stimulating sets that help organize children's viewing, directing attention to important detail with contrast, placement, and movement. They pay a good deal of attention to space, creating separate zones that are associated with certain activities.

As noted in Chapter 5, music plays a key role in children's lives as well as their media. Having theme songs and using music to announce transitions is a common tactic in children's programming and can be usefully copied in structuring a classroom day.

In addition to picking up tips and techniques from children's media to aid our teaching this new media-literate generation, it is also important for parents and educators to use television and other media as a springboard for conversation and interaction. The concerns of most media critics stem from the fact that television is often viewed passively.

That is, the TV is on most of the time, but as background, not for intentional viewing. This constant flow of noise punctuated by the occasional distraction of something interesting happening does not promote meaningful interaction and can in fact detract from it, as our attention is always split. It is better for preschoolers to watch only programs specifically designed for them and to watch them in the company of an adult who treats the program like any other story-sharing session, by practicing joint attention, asking and answering questions, interacting with the children at their direction, and encouraging active viewing practices such as singing or dancing along with the characters on the screen.

Coats, K. (2013).  Children’s literature & the developing reader  [Electronic version]. Retrieved from https://content.ashford.edu/