Using Illustrations to Understand Worksheet

Illustrations do far more than decorate a page. In the earliest books a child reads independently, the picture carries information the sentences leave out, and a reader who skips it loses half the story. This Using Illustrations to Understand Worksheet teaches first graders to read an illustration the way they read a line of text: looking for the setting, the action, and the feeling on a character’s face, then using those details as evidence. That habit sits at the heart of first grade reading standards, which ask students to use illustrations and words together to describe characters, settings, and events.

This first grade context clues worksheet gives students one short three-sentence story about a boy named Jonah and one full-color illustration of the yard where he spent his morning. The words tell readers that Jonah worked hard, skipped lunch, and grinned at the end. Only the picture tells them what the weather was like, how proud he looks, and what he actually built. Students read the story, study the picture beside it, and answer four questions: three fill-in-the-bubble items and one written response on wide first grade handwriting lines. Use it as a whole-class mini-lesson on the document camera, as a guided reading follow-up, or as independent morning work.

What’s Included

• 1 print-ready PDF worksheet
• Answer key
• 1 illustrated story with 4 picture-clue questions (3 fill-in-the-bubble, 1 written response)

Three things make this Using Illustrations to Understand Worksheet effective. First, the questions are answerable only from the picture, so a student cannot succeed by scanning the sentences for matching words — they have to look. Second, one item asks what the word grinned means, which turns the illustration into a vocabulary tool and shows children that a picture can define an unfamiliar word in context. Third, the final question asks students to name something the words never said, moving them from recognition to explanation and giving teachers a quick, honest window into who is really reading the whole page.

Teachers and parents can stretch the skill well past the page. Cover the words in a favorite picture book and ask children to narrate the story from the art alone, then uncover the text and compare. Have students draw an illustration for a sentence you read aloud and explain the detail they added that the sentence never mentioned. Play a quick game of “What does the picture know?” during read-alouds, pausing on each spread so children can name one fact only the illustrator told them. Each of these takes five minutes and builds the same evidence-gathering habit this worksheet practices.

Related Resources

• Using Picture Clues Worksheet
• Using Pictures as Context Clues Worksheet
• Context Clues Identifying Word Meaning Worksheet
• Context Clues Song by Have Fun Teaching