Sunday, March 23, 2014

Taking Up a Couple Challenges!

Ok so a little side bar from Education . . . 

I've taken on two personal challenges. My sister +Kristina Ambrosia-Conn has pushed me into completing the dares in the book This Book Will Change Your Life with her. She will be writing about it on her blog Weekly Wanderlust. I will comment along with her each day as well as update my personal twitter feed on @ASKeene with the #changemylife.  If you are feeling a bit daring, feel free to join us and comment on her blog about your experiences. 



We are currently on Day 4 and here's how I am doing:

Day 1 - tried to insult an insect, but couldn't find one so picked out my prettiest toe, see the picture on Weekly Wanderlust
Day 2 - gazed at everyone like they were the love of my life (but I kinda forgot)
Day 3 - throw away something you like - Good bye leggings! My husband is so happy as he HATES leggings. But I am sure going to miss their comfort!
Day 4 - (today) plan your next trip. I planned my next 3! Florida next week, NJ in June and NY in July. Possibly Dominican in June too! Feeling excited! 

The second challenge I have taken on is the 100 days of Happiness Challenge. This is encouraging participates to find time in everyday to do something that makes them happy. Today is day one and being that it is snowing and I am so missing the warm weather and a tan - I decided to go get a spray tan! Woohoo! Now to just hope I look brown and not orange.  If you want to follow along with my happy challenges I will be posting those on Facebook and my personal twitter account: @ASKeene with the #100happydays.  I definitely encourage you to join me on this one! Everyone could use a little more time for happiness! 

Comprehension Strategies: Visualizing Part 2 - Taking it to the Text

So my last post was all about making visualizing a concrete experience that students could understand. This post will focus on how I take the skill into texts with first graders. It is easy to just ask students to "draw what they see" but I really want my students to be able to cite the text evidence that accompanies their mental images, so you will see that every time I ask my students record their mental image I also require them to include words from the text in their work.

We begin with an idea from Strategies that Work. We read the wordless picture book Good Boy Carl by: Alexandra Day, a story of a dog who is left in charge of watching the baby while mom does some errands. We stop midway through on a double spread that shows Carl and the baby in front of a laundry shoot on one side and then Carl racing down the stairs on the other side. I ask students to visualize what is happening between the pages.



They draw their ideas and then write to explain what is happening to the baby.

Then we move into some poetry. The short text and break in stanzas is a great way for students to track their images and see that as the text changes so does our mental images. The first poem we use is Under the Bed By: Penny Tarznka.

 

Some other great poems are Rock and Roll Band By: Shel Silverstein and I Bought Our Cat a Jet Pack from the book The Tighty-Whitey Spider

Next we do a mini author study using Mercer Mayer's There's Something There! Collection. Each time students record the words they hear in the text and then illustrate their mental image.

From There's a Nightmare in My Closet: 



This time we really focused on using the words to help us determine and visualize the setting. From There's an Alligator Under My Bed: 



And then we finished up There's Something in the Attic.

Then we begin discussing specific types of words (nouns and verbs) and how they effect our visualizing. We went through the GRR model using the book Zoo At Night By: Martha Robinson and Antonio Frasconi. First we tapped into our schema charting animals we see at the zoo and what they do. I explained these words as nouns and verbs.  I then modeled finding the nouns and verbs using the hippo page and used those words to create a picture. Then students worked in small groups to do the same thing using the eagle, tortoise, alligator, and monkey pages. Each group highlighted the nouns and verbs, created a picture, and then presented to the class. Finally they choose a passage (either the jaguars and bats or the tigers and raccoons) and completed the same work on their own.  I didn't catch their group work on film, but here are their independent pages.



We continued this work adding adjectives to the mix using the books: 
Like Butter On Pancakes By Jonathan London and G. Brian Karas
Fireflies By: Julie Brinckloe
Night Sounds, Morning Colors By: Rosemary Wells
Where the Wild Things Are By:
The Salamander Room By: Anne Mazer
In the Tall, Tall, Grass By: Maurice Sendak
Night in the Country By: Cynthia Rylant


Here is our final bulletin board. You can't see the whole thing, but it has the red curtains on each side to resemble a theater. Each student has one piece of work displayed and it reads:
Our Mind Movies
We added words from the text to our schema to create mental images
We call this Visualizing
Embedded image permalink


I hope you found some strategies or book choices that you can use as you lead your students through visualizing in your room. If you have a great idea that I need to try in my room, please share it in the comments!  Happy Visualizing! 

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Comprehension Strategies: Launching Visualizing Part 1


" . . to read a book is to create a book. To read a book is to listen, to visualize, to see. If the readers, child or adult, cannot create the book along with the writer, the book is stillborn." - Madeleine L'Engle 

Why teach children to visualize?  As Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis say in their book Strategies that Work "(it) brings joy to reading." How many of you have sat through the movie release of your favorite book just to find that it falls flat in comparison? The beloved protagonist is missing their allure or that one moment from the book that you replayed in your head a dozen times is missing the setting, smells, and feelings that were evoked in your mind as you read. When we visualize we are creating our own mental movie and it is often the reason we connect to the stories - sometimes crying and laughing along side the characters. We see what they see and feel what they feel. And then - since it's in our mind- we have the freedom to add to that image to make it even more personal. Maybe a soundtrack accompanies the words, or perhaps that hero evolves into having the disheveled hair of your spouse, or perhaps the vengeance you feel towards a grade school bully is directed towards the villain.

When readers visualize they use words from the text, add it to their schema, and then create a mental image in their head. Visualizing, like inferring, asks readers to combine text evidence with their prior knowledge. Many students do not realize that they are in fact making inferences when they visualize. I teach visualizing before inferring, as I think it is a good stepping stone to the work I will ask them to do in that next unit. When I teach my students about making mental images I am always asking them to bring it back to the text and cite the evidence that influenced their mental images. When students are visualizing, their mental images are concrete and they are taking the "right there" information to make their pictures, whereas when we start inferring I expect them to go beyond the text. 

So, as with all my units I start by having my students explore the strategy through some of the concrete ideas presented in Tanny McGregor's book Comprehension Connections. As the students walk in on our first day with this new strategy they are greeted by an assortment of "out of place" objects. Seashells, an apple, a sand pail, some mittens . . . 
Then I provide each student with a "visualizing tube." I ask them to zoom in on one of the objects and look at it closely. As they are viewing it's details, I probe students to image it in the context of where it belongs. What would they see, smell, and hear near it? Then I ask them to record this mental image.

After visualizing, I group students who have chosen the same object. They compare their drawings, noticing how even though they all picked the same object they saw it in a different context.  For example some students were picking apples off a tree while others were handing it to their teacher as a gift. This is our first realization that our schema influences our mental images. 


Finally we end this lesson by connecting it to our work in reading. Here are the words Tanny McGregor suggests using with the kids: "Sometimes when you read, the writing helps you focus on something. Your brain can see it clearly, as if you were right there. Not only can you see with your mind, but sometimes you can smell, taste, hear and feel as well. We call this visualizing, or making a mental or sensory image. We have the ability to create these sensations in our heads, just be reading the print on the page. It's like magic! Being able to visualize makes reading so much more fun. Turn and talk to a friend about a time when you read something or someone read to you, and you could actually see or feel what was going on in the text." (Connections, 93)

Next, we begin discussing how words influence our mental images.  I launch this through music. First, I play Let It Snow. As the music plays, I ask students to close their eyes and listen. As they listen I ask them to shout out words they are hearing that they are also seeing in their heads. I try to catch what they say in a quick sketch. Once the song ends, students open their eyes and look at what I captured based on what they said. We go through the picture and talk about what words they heard and label those items in the picture (storm, snow, fire, corn (for popping), me, you). We also talk about why we included things that weren't in the song (snowman, Christmas tree, icicles, stockings, moon). We realize that our mental images are made up of not only the words we hear, but also what we have in our schema (i.e students know this is a Christmas Carol, so they inferred the setting - Christmas time - and what they would see during that time of year. I do not explain that they are inferring yet. I just want them to realize that visualizing happens when we add text clues to our schema to make a mental image. 


Finally, students practice on their own with another song. We listen to the song twice. On the first listen students simply draw. On the second listen I ask them to label the words they heard that they drew into their picture. Some songs I use are: Under the Boardwalk, Under the Sea, Over the Rainbow, Zip a Dee Doo Dah, and Monster Mash.

Check back soon to see how we take this into text!