Visual and verbal literacy skills are crucial to children because of their relationship to reading, and to adults because of their social utility. Such skills are, paradoxically, among those least often developed in a systematic fashion in elementary schools. One reason for this is that component subskills of visual and verbal literacy are infrequently identified. The three subskills identified in this paper are describing, comparing, and oral valuing. An effective way of encouraging children to learn these skills is to use illustrations from children's literature. The approach offers many advantages because illustrations are easy to locate, plentiful, and of much interest to children. The teacher attempting to use this approach will find that children respond eagerly and in the process develop valuable visual and verbal literacy skills. (TS)