Reading Comprehension-Visualizing

 HOW WE LEARN TO VISUALIZE

 One of the many reading strategies I try and teach my struggling readers is to visualize what they are reading.  Research has shown that students who are struggling with reading comprehension actually benefit from visualizing the material they read.  Creating what I like to call a T.V. in their head. 

  So how do we do it in my classroom???  Well we start off with several mini lessons using small sentences to get us started practicing the skill.  A sample sentence would look like this:

   " Sam was so excited to see all the balloons hanging around the room.  He saw his superhero cake on the table beside a pile of presents he could not wait to open.  "

  After reading this sentence I grab our white boards and then we draw what we saw.  We would draw a cake, balloons, and Sam.  We talk about how to create those pictures in our head.

HOW WE PRACTICE THOSE SKILLS

  After many lessons and practice using the skills, I decided it was time to take our lesson one step further.  We plan on looking at small passages and highlighting key words that will help us visualize after each small paragraph.  As we read the paragraphs we will go back with our pencil and highlight those key words that help us visualize what the passage is about. 

Next, we take a look at the pictures below our paper and check out which ones would be a best fit to the words we highlighted in each paragraph. 

   Finally, we glue them on and then check in our passage to make sure we visualized the correct picture to go with the passage. 

 The stories I created follow a theme and there is one for each day of the week.  On Friday my students are given review questions to practice their comprehension skills over the week. 



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