About a week ago I decided that I would teach visualization for my unit plan. I have been trying to think of different lessons that I could do to have the kids work on visualization. I came up with a few ideas but I didn't have enough to supply two weeks worth of lessons. After reading chapter nine it gave me some insight of what I should include in my lessons.
My questions to my group members are.... Have you taught visualization to your students? If so, what did you do? What makes you think it worked well/ did not work well? Were there any reading strategies/ sample units in chapter 9 that you would like to incorporate into your literacy lesson? Explain why you think they are worthy of being in your lesson.
I really enjoyed reading the section about, "Creating Mental Images That Go Beyond Visualizing." I love the idea of not only getting the students to see what they are reading but to imagine the sound, taste, touch, and smell too. I think it is great to get them to really imagine these details. Being able to imagine all of these things will truly allow the reader to reflect on what they read and remember it. They will have created a distinguished mental image and feeling that will be hard to forget. I also love how you can incorporate descriptive writing into this lesson. You could split the class into small groups and have each group get a different picture. Have the students individually write a paragraph about what they would see, hear, smell, taste, and feel if they were in that picture. After they are finished they could talk within their group about the details they included. Eventually they could share their paragraph with the whole class and they could compare what they wrote to the original picture.
In my classroom my teacher taught a visualization lesson. She had the students on the carpet and she discussed what it meant to make inferences from visualizing. She typically has the students close their eyes and visualize in their mind when she is trying to quickly get through a lesson. However, one day she introduced the students to a book about alligators. She told the students that she was going to cover the words on the pages and they were going to turn and talk to a partner about what they think the author wrote on that page based on the illustrations. So in a way it was like they were visualizing with a wordless picture book, except at the end of each page she asked certain partner groups what inferences they made. Once they were done sharing she uncovered the words so the students could see if they were correct or not. I think the mentor text in this instance might have been a little difficult for the students to visualize with, but I think this lesson could easily be done with another book with very vivid illustrations. The book had pictures on the page that didn't seem like they went together and the students were only thinking about one picture at a time and not the pictures as a whole.
ReplyDeleteMy literacy lesson is focused on writing instruction and I am not going to incorporate any reading strategies into my lesson. We are focusing on writing small moment stories. So, if I were to do a lesson on visualization, I would definitely do a picture walk with my students using a small moment story. I would cover up the words and have them write a small moment story based on the pictures in the book I show them. I think it would be very interesting to see what students are able to pick up on the specific "small moment in the story." I think there will be many different types of stories that would be interesting to discuss to the whole class about why we made those inferences based on pictures.
I really like Alyssa's idea of having the students write a paragraph based on their senses. Unfortunately I do not think this would work for my first graders because we have not introduced writing about our senses yet. I think it is important to share their stories in order to hear what other students wrote. It would be a good time to explain to students that not everyone's paragraphs will be the same.
We did something briefly in my classroom about visualization and it actually incorporated some of the other senses. However, beyond that one day we haven't really touched on or explicitly taught visualization and the students actually get really frustrated if we do not show the pictures to the book. We do read for about 15 minutes everyday from a chapter book (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) "for fun." So we read to them without discussing it afterword, which for them takes the pressure off and they actually sit and listen quite well. To me, this would be a good time to practice visualization because it is a chapter book so there aren't any pictures and it's their "fun book" so pressure is off and they may be more willing to participate actively and less self consciously.
ReplyDeleteFor this week, I had to read about Questioning. At first, I wasn't sure exactly what they meant by "questioning" but as I read I realized that this is something we do somewhat naturally in first grade. During our read alouds we often question during the reading to check for comprehension, understanding, and vocabulary as we read. I would like to find more ways to include more questioning and visualization in my lessons.