How does searching for images help your child learn to read?

The first skills that may come to mind when you think about your child learning to read are likely those that are related to letter recognition or understanding letter sounds. However, reading involves many skills including visual ones, and that’s why picking out details in pictures now will help them as they learn to read.  

When your child identifies specific details in a complex picture, they combine visual and cognitive skills. 

Picking out a specific detail in an image is a cognitive process. Your child must know what they are looking for, keep it in mind, as well as pay attention to everything else they can see.  

To achieve this, they’ll rely on their developing memory and vision. When they search for an image, they will absorb loads of information, but they also need to organise what they see in order to make sense of it. So, in order to identify a particular detail, they need to think about what they are looking for and focus their attention on finding it. 

Looking for specific details relies on eye-tracking movements  

You might find they move their whole head when they are looking for small images; this is a little clue to let you know that they are probably scanning in a spontaneous way.  

When they move their whole head, their gaze shifts haphazardly, for example, it might move from the top of the page to the bottom, to the left and back down to the bottom. There is no organisation or structure to their search, and they may not focus well enough on the things they do look at. 

When they start to read, it’ll be helpful for them to learn to track information with their eyes and not with whole head movements.  

They’ll need some guidance from you to help them plan a method of searching. Whether this be starting at the top left-hand side and scanning right, or from top to bottom, having a strategy that encourages eye-tracking movements now will be of great benefit. 

As your child starts to read, they won't read like you do. Instead, they’ll need to focus on each letter, group of letters or word and think about what that letter or word represents. 

This brings us back to how looking for details in complex pictures can help your child to read.  

These pictures help your child to develop their visual attention and focus, which will help them when they read. They’ll be better able to see individual letters and sounds and these will help them decode and blend to be able to read words. 

If your child finds very complex pictures too difficult at first, use simpler pictures and help them to think about looking systematically across and down the picture.