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

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!