There are real benefits to having pictures in a chapter book when it comes to helping a child become more visually literate. One aspect of visual literacy is actually the ability to visualize. This is kind of lifted from a wonderful book called Strategies that Work byt Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis – so nods and thanks to them.
In the book they suggest visualizing from a vivid piece of text – and then discussing what you see in your mind’s eye. Well, I’ve been in meetings with Ivy League grads who couldn’t visualize their shoe if they were looking at it in the mirror – and no I’m not exaggerating. This was a remarkable experience for me, because over the course of my life I very consciously cultivated the skill of visualizing things in my mind’s eye.
And the way the DaVinchy Chapter Book Series for kids plays into this is that it jumpstarts the imagination. I mean, kids will already know what DaVinch and Milo look like. The process will be more like imagining what they look like in any given scene or scenario from the book.
There is real value in this process, not just from the point of visual literacy – imaging for the sake of becoming proficient at imaging. But if you buy the dual coding view of reading, that visualizing the words in your head helps you process the decoding of letters and words and turn them into meaning – than any visualizing practice you give a kid is good.
Plus, if you then give your kids a box of crayons and a sheet of paper and let them sketch it out – you stretch their muscles even farther.
Maybe you think it’s funny to talk about visualizing muscles. But that is exactly what they are like. If you use visualizing just a little bit, than when you are asked to visualize what you “see” in your mind’s eye will be vague. But when you practice it for a while, you can create visualizations that are 3 dimensional to the point that you can walk around them and study them. Interestingly, if you read about Nikolai Tesla, the greatest inventor of the 20th century, you will learn that he not only visualized the AC motor before making one – he also let it “run” in his head for a couple months and watched what parts wore out.
The connection between visualizing and genius or at the least creativity is a fairly well established one. So all good things will accrue from this simple exercise.