4 Ways to Use Photographs to Teach Reading Skills
Kids are so drawn to real photographs! My baby always blows kisses when he sees photographs of babies or kids in his board books.
I love using photographs to teach reading because it eliminates barriers of the text and students reading ability. This creates a low risk environment for student participation and really promotes discussion! It is also so interesting how students’ personal background knowledge provides them with a unique perspective on the picture. Photographs encourage such a fun opportunity to learn from each other!
4 Ways that I use Photographs to teach reading
- I use photographs to teach a whole group introduction to a reading strategy. For example, if I am teaching inferences I will ask students to talk about the photograph and what they notice. As the discussion develops, I will point out when and how inferences are meaning made. I can also use the picture to model my own think aloud of inferencing.
- During centers, my students use photographs to implementing reading strategies themselves. For example, I will have a graphic organizer and maybe a sentence starter printed for them. After the students look at the picture they will write down their inference, prediction, question, or whichever reading strategy we are focusing on that week.
- I use photographs to teach necessary background knowledge for a text that we are reading. For example, if we are reading a book about trains I would gather various pictures of trains for students to look at and discuss prior to reading the book.
- Photographs are great for writing responses! You can provide students with a general prompt or leave it open for them to free write. For example, I like to provide a few pictures of people and ask students to choose one to compare to the main character of our book.
I also feel good about printing these high ink pictures and laminating them because you can use them OVER AND OVER!!
Where can you get photographs to teach reading?
- I have photograph task cards for each reading strategy where I picked pictures that specifically work well for that skill but can be used for any! Try these FREE photograph task cards while making connections!
- You can cut pictures out of newspapers or magazines.
- You can use google images if you are just using the pictures with your students.
- Pixabay.com has a lot of free photographs that I enjoy using!
Check out this video where I show examples and explain more!
