This article explores one context in which language arts instruction can be enhanced through digital technologies. It describes how preservice elementary education teachers first investigated aspects of visual literacy and then engaged in digital and traditional multimodal forms of response to historical nonfiction literature. They read,…

Care providers can help develop visual literacy in school-age children by taking children on trips to local art museums and television stations and by having children produce their own low-cost photographs, color slides, or film strips. Provides detailed directions for making slides from magazine photographs and new film strips from old film. (MDM)

Presents students' drawings that resulted from a discussion of literary works and their illustrations. (RL)

Discusses the findings of 13 sequential studies done by Project Zero on children's sensitivity to artistic styles. Research indicated that there is a developmental sequence in artistic perception. Young children could learn to identify artistic styles but often had difficulty connecting the original paintings with small reproductions used in…

Part of a larger project to design a production curriculum and measure the impact of this production activity on children's writing, visual thinking, and problem solving skills, a project developed an effective but inexpensive video for use in teaching animation processes to students at the elementary school level. The project used "cutout" or…

Discusses importance of the ability to visualize images evoked by the written word in the development of children's skills in both reading and creative writing. Specific skills involved are noted, examples from picture books are given, and 48 picture books that would be useful to developing such skills are listed. (EM)

Defines aesthetic scanning, the perceptual activity that artists use when creating art and that connoisseurs use when contemplating it. Shows how to ask questions that elicit information about the sensory, formal, expressive, and technical properties of a work of art. (JDH)

This study of 26 children (ages 8-12) with hearing impairment found that the degree of hearing loss and spoken language competence independently affected the ability to understand the information presented on commercial and educational television programs. Language skills were a stronger predictor of comprehension than the degree of hearing loss.…