In this article, the authors designed a study to explore what children's own drawings reveal about their viewing skills and to examine the interplay between visual and verbal literacies. Specifically, the authors wanted to determine how two communication systems--visual and verbal literacies--contribute to children's abilities to extract meaning from picture books. Two groups of kindergarten students participated in Picture Power, a thematically based read-aloud project that featured a variety of picture books about houses. The group from the United States included 22 children from Philadelphia and the Chinese group included 30 children from Fuzhou. Children were connected to follow-up activities through scripted prompts that were designed to initiate and focus the drawing sessions and were asked to draw and then communicate orally about the pictorial contents. The results of a qualitative, interpretative analysis show that kindergartners employ a variety of schematic images that are already part of their visual drawing repertoire. These schematized images are then combined with new features they extract from visual-verbal components of picture books. The interpretations provided in this article are intended to prepare teachers and parents to understand children's art so that they may extend communication and advance early literacy learnings. (Contains 9 figures.)