Visual Thinking Strategies for Preschool: Using Art to Enhance Literacy and Social Skills - Softcover

Philip Yenawine is cocreator of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) with cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen. He is currently cofounder and creative director of Watershed, a nonprofit entity established to support student-centered, inquiry-based teaching, including the dissemination of VTS through an innovative online platform. Watershed forms partnerships with other organizations focused on helping reform-oriented teachers find and use resources as well as communicate with one another.

Yenawine was director of education at the Museum of Modern Art from 1983 to 1993. He 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 Association’s Award for Distinguished Service in 1993, was the George A. Miller Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois in 1996, and the first Educator-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2012, among other honors. He is on the board of Art Matters, a foundation giving fellowships to cutting-edge artists.

Yenawine is the author of How to Look at Modern Art, Key Art Terms for Beginners, and six children’s books about art among other writing projects. His most recent book, Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to Deepen Learning Across School Disciplines, was published by Harvard Education Press in October 2013. He attended Princeton University from 1960 to 1963, and holds a BA from Governor’s State University, University Park, Illinois, and an MA from Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Kansas City Art Institute in 2003.

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 powerful learner-centered environments for young children just beginning their formal school experience.
 
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.

“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

Philip Yenawine is a cofounder of Visual Understanding in Education, former director of education at the Museum of Modern Art, and a recipient of the National Art Education Association’s Award for Distinguished Service.