Printable

Reading With Picture Clues

Use pictures to build children's reading confidence.

  1.  Print out the page and read the story together, running your fingers along the lines as you read them. When you get to a picture, point to it and pause, giving children a few moments to chime in. You might underline the word that spells out the image.
  2. When you’re finished, say something like, “You did a great job reading that story,” or “Thank you for helping me read that story.”
  3. Next time you read a book together, help kids use pictures to understand what’s happening, like they just did. Younger kids can use this strategy to “read” a whole story (narrating the story based on the pictures alone). Older readers can use pictures as clues to help them read a word they don’t know (for instance, if they’re struggling with the end of a word beginning with “el,” and there’s a picture of an elephant on the page, they get a hint that the word is “elephant”)!