Visual Aids for Kids: Fun Tools for Better

How To Use Visual Aids

There are many types of visual aids you can create. However, they must be chosen thoughtfully. The most effective visual aids match the learner’s age, interests, and the complexity of the content.

Younger children are able to perform better when they have bold and clear images to work with. Older children enjoy it when they get to make decisions.

Keeping that in mind, here are some examples of visual aids you can use.

• Picture Cards for Introducing Story Elements

Picture cards help bring story components to life. Characters, locations, and objects become familiar before the storytelling begins. As the narrative unfolds, picture cards serve as recall cues. 

Picture cards are great visual aids for storytelling. You can put simple pictures of scenery, set pieces, and other objects that children have to imagine when following or creating a story.

During class, teachers can hold up or pass the picture cards to the students so they can have a visual reference of important locations and events. This helps younger children connect events and ideas and describe them later from memory.

Later, when you make the students write their own stories, they will draw inspiration from the picture cards to conjure mental images for their own stories and make them feel more weighty, realistic, empathetic, and interesting.

• Storyboards for Plot and Sequencing

Stories are structured; they have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Others describe the same structure as “exposition, climax, resolution.” To teach children storytelling, you need to teach them this basic structure. 

A great visual aid for this is a storyboard. Storyboards let you break parts of your story into clear sections. They help children visually understand how this structure flows and how they can use it to craft stories of their own.

This structure is the primary reason why storytelling is so effective for communication. So, by using storyboards, you can teach children the foundational skills required for more advanced reading and writing.

• Illustrations for Emotional and Descriptive Understanding

Illustrations are bigger and more detailed compared to picture cards. Picture cards only show singular objects, while illustrations show entire scenes. 

Illustrations can help communicate the emotions, tone, and atmosphere that are required for a scene. The colors and details present also ensnare children’s attention and let them interpret visual cues on their own.

This helps them develop thinking and reasoning skills that are vital for effective storytelling.

• Adding a Wheel Spinner for Interactive Engagement

We mentioned that older kids like to make their own decisions, and that's great for storytelling. However, you can expect children to be good at making decisions so they need some guidance.

To do that, you can use a wheelspinner as a visual aid. This is beneficial because it provides children with a starting point, rather than leaving them without direction, which can make them feel at a loss.

Here’s how a wheelspinner can help kids with storytelling. 

• Put images of characters and locations on different wheels. Let the kids spin the wheel to select which new character or location appears in the story next.
• Put plot devices on a wheel. Let the kids spin the wheel to decide how their story progresses further. This kind of “make your own story” exercise is excellent for developing storytelling skills.
• Character traits. You can put these on a wheel to let kids decide what character traits they want in their story characters.
• This interactive approach strengthens flexible thinking, encourages verbal expression, and keeps children invested in the story’s progression. It also gives them ideas for when they have to write their own stories.