I Spy…..
Think back to when you were a kid, do you remember playing I spy? You might have looked around the room and said something like, ” I spy with my little eye something green and round”. Then those playing the game with you, were challenged to look around the room and see if they could guess what you saw.
When my family played this game, it never seemed to go smoothly. My brother was always describing things that no one else saw. This was before it was discovered that he was color blind. So, often, he looked at something, described it as one color, and the rest of us saw it as something else.
I Spy is a perfect example of close looking, a technique applied to learning to read images.
When you’re reading a book or blog post, for the most part, we agree that we read left to right, line by line. This organization helps us to ensure that we don’t miss parts of the story. And while images do tend to follow an organization structure, we get tricked into thinking that we can take one quick look at an image and “read” everything on the page.
Look at the image, and sign, or even look around you. Make note of everything that you see. Then look again, but this time even closer. What did you miss before?
While working on some activities for a new children’s book The Ice Cream Mill, I decided to make ice cream cones, as a playful way to warm up my mind, and to use the scrap-painted paper left over from creating images for the book. As I grabbed the next piece of scrap paper, I saw surprised to see that there was already an ice cream cone on the page.
Except, that it wasn’t. It was a purse, hanging on a hook, and I was looking at it upside down. Since, I’d already made about 10 ice cream cones, my brain quickly determined that’s what I was looking at. I had to slow down, look a bit closer, and turn the page around, to realize that I was actually looking at an advertisement for a purse.
