Visualization Activities Skills in Reading
TV, video games and movies use other people's imagery to barrage students with a visual form of storytelling. When it comes to reading, however, the storytelling becomes an automatic action. Students see the words but don't see the images they represent. The trick is teaching students to use their imagination to picture the scenes and characters, using visualization as a vessel to grasp and improve retention of the material while they're reading.
Other People Are Reading
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Modeling Visualization -- Teachers' Turn
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Talk with students about how visual media (TV, movies) affect the way people read and ask them to suggest ways to use visual images to enhance their reading experience. Parents and teachers can read a passage aloud, then describe the movies their head shows, or they can draw the imagery they have visualized in the passage.
Comparing Visualization --- Students' Turn
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Give students a passage to read. Pair students with a partner and have them describe what they visualized while reading the material. Have students write down their visualization, then read the students' visualizations aloud. Ask students how the visualizations were alike or different, if any visualization was something they hadn't thought of and if they could picture another person's imagery in their mind's eye.
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Visualizing With Senses and Feelings
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Give students a passage to read, telling them to use their senses to visualize while reading. Have them describe the taste and smell of the Red Riding Hood's goodies, the sound of the big, bad wolf blowing down the pigs' houses, or before and after pictures of the Frog Prince. Have students visualize what characters might be feeling. They can imagine Red Riding Hood's fear, the cobbler's surprise upon discovering the elves who secretly helped him every night or Cinderella's sadness over her stepmother and stepsister's treatment.
Text/Image Charts
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Have students create a text-image chart while reading a passage. Divide a piece of paper in half, then label the left side "Text" and the right side "Visualization." On the left side, students list single words, phrases or sentences that invoked an image. In the right-hand column, next to each text entry, students either draw the image or describe the visualization in detail using vivid verbs and nouns.
Other Visualization Activities
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Other ways to help students visualize what is being read include showing them related photos and films or having them find images related to their reading from newspapers and magazines, and through web searches. Show students how the new reading material builds on knowledge they already have and how future reading material will build on the current reading. Enhance the reading experience with music, tying the rhythm of the music to the cadence of the words or tying the music to the mood of the reading material. Have students create cartoons from the text, dramatize the story in a play -- complete with props illustrating some of the concepts -- or report on the text as "breaking news" in a classroom newscast or a newspaper.
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References
Resources
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