Visualizing Reading Strategy To Improve Reading Comprehension

This post may contain affiliate links, and I will earn a commission if you purchase through these links. Please read the disclosure policy for more details. There are so many strategies that we learn to teach reading comprehension but in this post, I share my favorite visualizing reading strategy that helps struggling readers improve their reading comprehension: visualization with structure... This visualizing reading strategy is the foundation of the extremely successful reading program Lindamood-Bell Visualizing & Verbalizing. It is the most effective reading intervention I have used to improve reading comprehension in struggling readers. *Most school spam filters block my emails, so please use a personal email.

Most of us are not explicitly taught the one reading comprehension strategy that is proven to work best. Visualizing text is a proven way to improve reading comprehension. It is a technique that can be taught using this simple, step-by-step strategy from literacy consultant Cathy Puett Miller. Included: Tips and resources for developing students' comprehension skills. Each day, our students are bombarded with the visual images of TV and video games. In contrast, most students view reading as a passive activity.

But a simple technique -- visualization -- can transform students of all ages from passive to active readers; visualization can help students cross the boundary to improved comprehension. Your students will be able to grasp the visualization technique by following a simple, step-by-step plan: Direct modeling of the active thought processes involved in visualizing text is the first step. Begin with a familiar fiction read-aloud. As you read a short passage, describe images you see in your mind. For example, you might use the following quote from Where the Wild Things Are:

After reading that quote, share with students the images you visualized as you read it. The visual imagery strategy (also called visualizing or mind pictures) encourages readers to engage their imagination and use sensory details from the text to construct mental images of scenes, characters, events, and concepts. Using visual imagery, students imagine what the characters might see, hear, feel, taste, or smell. The visual imagery strategy is effective for improving comprehension, especially in descriptive texts or literature rich in sensory details. Follow these few simple steps to provide practice developing students’ mental images: In this video, learn three different tips to help students practice their visualization skills.

(Susan Jones Teaching) Help kids understand their reading by teaching them how to visualize and create mental images in their head of what they are reading and hearing. From Into the Book (Wisconsin Public Media), lesson plans that help students learn to visualize: In my years of teaching, I have found the students who struggle with reading comprehension, but who have mastered other elements of reading such as decoding and fluency, to be some of the more... In the book I Read It, But I Don’t Get It, Cris Tovani (2000) calls these readers “word callers” due to their focus on reading individual words and not the bigger picture of a... Because their oral reading is strong, they often get lost in the shuffle or are assumed to be “solid” readers.

The truth is, this demonstrates a much too narrow idea of what it means to read. Reading is so much more than the words on the page, and many who enjoy reading talk about the ability of a text to transport them to another world. This highlights the depths that strong reading comprehension can take us to. Much like developing a base for discussing decoding and fluency with students, establishing a common language for reading comprehension is of great importance. Many teachers focus on the six active reading strategies: Visualize; Clarify; Question; Predict; Connect; Evaluate. I’ve even heard the catchy mnemonic device, “Vicky called Queen Penelope cute and energetic” used to jog students’ memories.

Visualizing challenges students to paint a mental picture or movie of what they are reading. Similarly, when students are clarifying what they have read, they pause to check their comprehension by summarizing and re-reading if necessary. Questioning is a bit more open-ended as students might question their own comprehension, or they might engage with the text by asking questions about the author’s purpose or a character’s motivation. I find that predicting often comes most easily to students. They are primed from their earliest experiences with reading to consider what might happen next. When students are connecting with the text, they relate what they have read to their own experiences, another text, a class, a movie, etc.

The last strategy, evaluating, is often challenging for students because it requires that they develop an opinion about the text’s characters or events, or, on a deeper level, the tone or theme. While each of these strategies serves a purpose in helping students deepen their comprehension, none is effective without proper explanation and practice. Students also need direct instruction in recognizing where their comprehension breaks down. Initially this metacognitive exercise may feel like a game of whack-a-mole: teaching students to notice gaps in comprehension and work to fill them in. However, teaching students to stop when understanding breaks down builds a strong base for dissecting text on the initial read, which leaves these gaps in comprehension smaller and fewer and farther between. I believe one of the best ways to support students in this process is by zooming in on the strategy of visualizing.

Additionally, the task of visualizing, or creating what David Kilpatrick calls a “situational model” (2015), requires the integration of many cognitive and language-based skills. As students begin to integrate “background knowledge, experience, and vocabulary” (Kilpatrick, 2012), the demands on working memory decrease. It is, for this reason, that time spent building a student’s ability to create a mental picture is time well spent. For students who struggle with reading comprehension, visualizing should develop from the image level, – that is, without reading words on a page. The goal of this is to build the process and skill without overtaking students by adding reading. Eventually, through the removal of scaffolding, students will independently employ the strategy of visualizing while reading to enhance comprehension.

This process begins by prompting the student to describe a provided image. Initial answers will likely be brief, and the use of cueing and prompting will be of the utmost importance to begin modeling how a student might describe what they see. It is also important to note that teachers should not tell a student that they are wrong, but should rather steer them to a more accurate response through the use of cueing strategies. From there, a teacher can provide a student with a single word to visualize. Here they may work with pairs of words to elicit the student to consider the subtleties of language. For instance, a student might first think about someone who is happy and then see the shift when that student is described as ecstatic.

A deeper level of questioning might prompt a student to consider what would make someone happy versus what might make them ecstatic. These kinds of questions can challenge a student to begin to look at the larger language of a text, which they will move towards as the focus shifts from the sentence and to the... Finally, a student will begin to visualize full passages as they read, all the while watching the movie in their head. Reading comprehension is something that students can find really difficult. Reading strategies are taught in order to give students the tools to improve their comprehension of texts. Visualization is one of these skills and is super important for students as it’s how they create mental images of what they are reading.

We’ve found 20 of the best activities for teaching the visualization reading strategy to your students and getting them on their way to improving their comprehension. Check them out below! A great way to introduce visualizing to your students is with this shared activity. Select some students as your visualizers and have them take turns drawing what they visualize as your read a story to your class. Your class can then try to guess the title of the book based on the pictures drawn. This video is a great way to explain visualization to your students and depicts why it’s an important skill to improve reading comprehension.

This is a great way to start your visualization lessons with older students. This activity pack offers a wide range of visualization activities. It’s jam-packed with task cards, support sheets, varied worksheets, and prompts for students. This post is the first in a series about reading comprehension strategies. Today’s reading comprehension strategy is using visualization as we read. Or in other words, making a movie of the book in our mind as it unfolds.

Some children may do this naturally as they read and some may need some or a lot of help developing this skill. Regardless, almost all children will improve their reading comprehension skills from their current level if you use some of the strategies below. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-44662" src="https://peanutbutterfishlessons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Slide2-2-200x300.jpg" alt="Pinnable cover image for article titled Reading Comprehension Strategy #1: Visualization showing a girl reading next to a lion." width="350" height="525" srcset="https://peanutbutterfishlessons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Slide2-2-200x300.jpg 200w, https://peanutbutterfishlessons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Slide2-2-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://peanutbutterfishlessons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Slide2-2-600x900.jpg 600w, https://peanutbutterfishlessons.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Slide2-2.jpg... (Note: This post contains affiliate links for your convenience. Click here to read our full disclosure.) When we talk about visualizing what we read, we are not just talking about what you “see“.

We are also talking about the other sensations a story can make you feel. You may “smell” the food cooking in story or even “taste” it. You may “hear” the crunching of the leaves as one of the characters walks in the woods. You may even “feel” sensations in your body such as chills or your stomach clenching.

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