Teaching our students to visualize while they read is an important reading comprehension skill. In the past, I’ve found that my students love learning to make mental images. They enjoy learning to “create a movie” in their mind. Below, I detail how to teach the reading comprehension strategy visualization in a fun, engaging way for your first and second grade students. Click here to see it on Teachers Pay Teachers.
Visualizing Lesson Plans
With our brand new visualizing reading unit, you can plan all of your lesson plans! This is helpful if you don’t have a solid reading curriculum in your school district. There are 5 comprehensive lesson plans for you to effectively teach students to visualize as they read.
They are:
- What Is Visualizing?
- We Can Use Our Schema To Visualize
- We Can Use Our Five Senses To Visualize
- Visualizing While We Read
- Putting It Altogether
Pre- And Post-Assessments for Visualization
You can assess your students before teaching your visualizing reading unit before you even teach it! You might be wondering why, but I find assessing students before teaching any topic helpful because then I can see what students know from the previous schooling. If your whole class has a solid foundation in creating mental images while they read, then you will be able to plan your instruction accordingly. No need to teach something they already know! Then, you can give the same assessment when you are finished teaching as a post-test.
Pre- and post-assessments are a great sample to keep for parent/teacher conferences to show the growth of your students to their caretakers. They are also great for data teams if you are measuring growth in that area.
Visualizing Reading Passages
The reading passages included in this unit aren’t exactly passages, but instead poems. I intentionally wrote the poems with sensory words so that students could truly create a mental image of the poem.
Visualization Reading Centers
There are 2 reading centers included in this reading unit.
They are:
- Visualizing Puzzle Center: Students read the short sentence on one piece of a puzzle. Then, they find the picture that matches their visualization to attach the puzzle piece to.
- Snapping Photos Of Our Mental Images: Students read the task card. Then, they draw their visualization on the recording sheet.
Craftivity
Students will love the fun craftivity included. Read Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (affiliate link) without showing the pictures. Then, students draw what they visualized while listening to the story. They will also detail the sensory word that helped them see that picture.
More Visualization Activities Included
More activities are included to help you teach the reading comprehension strategy visualization! They are:
- No Prep Pages: These no prep pages are a cut/paste activity. Students read the sentence, then create a mental image. They glue the sentence to the matching visualization in the picture.
- Bookmarks: Who doesn’t love a bookmark? Students can keep these in their book tubs and refer back to them during independent reading.
- Discussion Cards: These discussion cards were designed to be used during guided reading. However, they could be used during a whole group read aloud as well. The discussion cards include prompts to help students visualize what they are reading.
- Graphic Organizers: These were made to be used with any text. They work well in a listening center, in whole group setting, tutoring, etc.
How To Teach Visualization: Grab A Freebie!
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