Visualizing/Making Mental Images.... help explain the what, why and how of your child’s new reading vocabulary. This is a concept many of our guided reading groups have been working on and is very difficult for many students to do.
The comprehension strategy of Visualizing is also known as Making Mental Images or Creating Mind Movies.
Visualizing is the creation of images in the mind as the student reads, processes and recalls what has been read. Visualizing a picture or scene with the words and phrases allows the reader to organize the ideas, to see the relationship among the ideas, and to make meaningful connections with them. Using visualization and discussing the pictures to check for understanding and discrepancies help a reader increase comprehension.
Please give opportunities for students to discuss and share their visualizations of text when you are reading nightly at home.
Visualizing helps students to:
• bring personal prior knowledge to the forefront
• check their mental images against text for discrepancies and detail to gain a more complete understanding
• match language to the images and therefore improve their processing of ideas
• connect in meaningful ways to what is read
• assist other students who have little experience making mental images, to improve.
In class we use a lot of graphic organizers to assist students to visualize the relationships between ideas. Graphic organizers such as the following will be used to teach Visualizing:
• concept maps • outlines • charts • list • cluster maps • comic strips
Graphic organizers are the best way for us to teach children how to organize information and make their thinking visible to others. They support students to connect new learning to a student’s prior knowledge. It is important that students continue making connections to activate prior knowledge well into this strategy of making mental images.
