Getting Festive for Fall with the Virginia Bloggers

Welcome to the Getting Festive for Fall with the Virginia Bloggers Blog Hop! So excited that you stopped by!

The sights of fall are so beautiful...a great time of year to practice visualizing skills!!

My second graders are adding comprehension tools to their Reader's Toolbox. In our comprehension program Making Meaning, we've had several read alouds where the students have practiced visualizing what was read aloud. Visualizing is a lot of fun for me because I love getting to draw- and what kid doesn't love to draw??

I'm going to talk about the first two books only... We are still in the middle of our visualizing unit! The first read aloud is a book called A Tree is Nice by Janice May Udry. Students listen to the story about all the different ways a tree can be used and enjoyed. The text is rich with good descriptive words to help students with the imagery. As the book is read, the pictures are not shown so that the students practice listening to the text and making the pictures in their mind and not relying on the illustrations to guide them, only the text.

The next read aloud is a poem called "My Baby Brother" from the book Fathers, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers by Mary Ann Hoberman. Students focus on visualizing the main character from the poem. Students have a hard time visualizing the baby from the poem rather than making a connection to their own baby brother, cousin, or baby they know. Getting students to really hone in on the details is important to good understanding and comprehension of a story.

Here are a few pictures of what my students visualized...keep in mind, they had to listen to the poem and did not see the picture.

Outside of our Making Meaning program, how do we practice visualizing? I have found that incorporating poetry helps students practice on shorter pieces of text that are still rich in imagery. Several poems that I have used are from Jack Prelutsky's The Frog Wore Red Suspenders. These poems are perfect for practicing whole group, small group, or even as independent practice.

So, you need some practice visualizing? Here is a poem that I wrote along with two graphic organizers to scaffold as appropriate, and a rubric that I've created just for you to use! Please leave some feedback if you download.