USF Lecture Series

Art Viewing Experiences and Early Literacy of Babies

Dr. Kathy Danko-McGhee Associate Professor and Program Director of Art Education and Pre-Art Therapy

Viewing works of art can provide a launch pad for  fostering early literacy.  Viewing strategies will be shared about infants who have the ability to fixate on art they prefer and taking that opportunity to use expressive words to describe the artwork to them. This strategy helps with building early receptive language at a time in development when neuron connections are being fired up in the brain. This is important because children reared in non-stimulating environments enter kindergarten with a receptive vocabulary of 3,000 words compared to those reared in more stimulating environments and have a vocabulary of 20,000 words. Talking to babies is important in developing receptive language because vocabulary is an important predictor for school success.