When a child is born, the first thing that they learn is what they are looking at. They are able to identify their mother, father, and other every day things almost instantly. However, if you put a word in front of them, they wouldn't have the slightest idea what those squiggly things were. One of the first things an infant learns is different words. Even before they are able to speak the words, and long before they are able to read or write them, they can identify the sound that someone makes and what they are referring to when that particular sound is made. For this reason, children's books are more important than would be expected. What a child is looking at when his/her mother flips through a picture book is what they will learn. The words that are printed in a children's book must be picked carefully and perfectly line up with the images on the page above, because the child could care less about what the words say when he is looking at the pictures, but is still listening to the reader tell the story.

Even today, pictures are more comforting to an adults mind than words. It is what we first learned and are used to. Wouldn't a grown businessman rather find Waldo all day than read reports on the economic crisis? Images are what we live by, we don't walk around all day looking at the word "tree" standing upright, and the word "car" doesn't fly by on the highway. Our eyes take thousands of pictures a second and piece them all together to make the world as we know it. That presents the question of how to teach a child who is born blind. They do not know what anything looks like, so how can they relate words to images? I know that as a child I read every Bernstein Bears book at least ten times and i could regurgitate every image in each of those books and tell you what the story meant based on the images, but never could i tell you word for word the happenings in the books. All children, no matter what you say, learn in pictures!