Visual Thinking Strategies for Preschool
Using Art to Enhance Literacy and Social Skills
Philip Yenawine
cloth, 192 Pages
Pub. Date: March 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1-68253-158-7
Price: $56.00
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paper, 192 Pages
Pub. Date: March 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1-68253-157-0
Price: $31.00
Add to Cart
Visual Thinking Strategies for Preschool shows how teachers can add visual thinking strategies (VTS) to their existing curriculum to encourage language, critical thinking, and social skills for children ages three to five. In this sequel to his popular book, Visual Thinking Strategies, author Philip Yenawine describes using art and other visual experiences to create engaging and powerful learner-centered environments for young children just beginning their formal school experience.
Implemented in hundreds of schools, districts, and cultural institutions, the VTS teaching method features an open‐ended conversation about a selected work of art. Teachers facilitate the group conversation using simple questions: “What’s going on in this picture?,” “What do you see that makes you think that?,” and “What more can we find?”
The book provides transcripts and analysis of classroom conversations as a means of illustrating the range of ways VTS can be used with preschoolers. Drawing on interviews with preschool teachers from public, private, and charter schools from around the country, Yenawine highlights the benefits of these discussions for students, including English language learners and students with special needs.
Visual Thinking Strategies for Preschool provides teachers with another means to teach language and social skills, and introduces students to the treasures found in art.
Praise
VTS masterfully encourages children to see, think, speak, and analyze—enhancing vocabulary and fostering creative thinking. Philip Yenawine provides a step-by-step guide on how to implement VTS in a classroom with young children, while providing an in-depth overview of the theory behind the method.
— Keith Whitescarver, executive director, National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector
Visual Thinking Strategies for Preschool is a wonderful resource for early child educators! Drawing upon theorists from Piaget to Vygotsky, the methods of Montessori and Reggio Emilia, and the practices from early childhood classrooms across the country, Yenawine provides innovative strategies for creating environments rich in language and visual stimuli for teaching young children.
— Martha Barry McKenna, university professor, director of Creativity Commons, Lesley University
One can learn much, with pleasure, from this book. Yenawine shows that children in preschool learn that images can be interpreted with simple strings of words which, as the children realize they are being listened to, become sentences describing their own interpretations, and thus their own stories.
— Lella Gandini, US liaison for the dissemination of the Reggio Emilia Approach
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About the Author
Philip Yenawine is cofounder of Visual Understanding in Education (VUE), a nonprofit educational research organization that develops and studies ways of teaching visual literacy and of using art to teach thinking and communication skills. VUE’s curriculum, Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), is in use in schools across the United States and abroad. Director of Education at the Museum of Modern Art from 1983 to 1993, Yenawine also directed education programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art earlier in his career. He was founding director of the Aspen Art Museum and consulting curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. He has taught art education at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and Massachusetts College of Art. He received the National Art Education Associations Award for Distinguished Service in 1993, was the George A. Miller Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois in 1996, and was the first Educator-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2012, among other honors. He is on the board of the Art Matters foundation. Yenawine is the author of How to Look at Modern Art, Key Art Terms for Beginners, and six children’s books about art. He helps with image selection as well as acts as a moderator for the NYTimes.com Learning Network feature, “What’s Going On in This Picture?”
Yenawine attended Princeton University from 1960 to 1963, and holds a BA from Governor’s State University in Park Forest South, Illinois, and an MA from Goddard College in Plainfi eld, Vermont. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Kansas City Art Institute in 2003.