Visualization with Vinny the Vegetable

Reading to Learn

By Jessica Campbell

Rationale:

Visualization requires students to combine their own background knowledge, text evidence, and creativity to make an image in their mind to match the story that they are reading. The images that they make help them to understand what they are reading at a deeper level. As we teach students to make mental pictures and visualize as they read, we must provide students with opportunities to practice pulling their own background knowledge and gathering important language from the text to help create their own creative mental image of the books.

Materials:

Book: The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Plain sheets of paper
Pencil and Pens

Procedures:

Introduction: Explain why Visualization is important

Say: “Visualizing is an important reading strategy that good readers use to help create mental images or movies in their minds to represent the ideas that they read in the text. Visualization helps readers because it allows another way to enjoy reading by the use of imaging, especially if the reader is struggling with different sounds and words.”

Activity: Paper pass out and use

Say: “That the students can start the activity by folding the piece of paper into fourths so that they have four boxes on the front and four on the back. Then have the students label each box from 1-8.”

Book reading

Say: “We are now going to read a book and work on our visualization skills using this book and our folded sheets of paper.”

Booktalk: The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a story about a small caterpillar who emerges from an egg and begins eating everything in sight. As he continues to eat he will discover all about food over days and if we keep reading we will discover more and more about different foods that the very hungry caterpillar is going to eat.

Teach class about the importance of the visuals and questions we can ask

Say: “We are creating these visuals for the story so we can help understand the story and its meaning in its full potential. Let's first look at three questions that we can use and ask ourselves as we are creating our visual through three questions. These questions are important in discussion to ask during the illustration sharing time: How are your illustrations the same and different from the ones in the book? What words from the text helped you to create that illustration? How do your illustrations help you to better understand the story?” Let's keep these in mind as we start to work on our illustrations. We are going to put these questions on the board to help remember as we continue with our lesson.

Creating our visualizations:

Say:” As we begin to read our book, we are going to stop 8 different times to have us work on each to illustrate what they visualized right before I stopped reading. Once I finish reading the book, we will all take a minute to gather our illustration in full, then I will reread the book, this time sharing the illustrations.”

Review our Visualizations:

Say: “Now let's think back to the questions that we talked about earlier. We can really focus on each visualization by breaking down the how, why, what and when that led to the visualization that you drew. Would anyone like to share their visualization talking about one of out three questions that are on the board. I am also going to take a moment and reread our book showing all of you the illustrations that were originally created for the book by the writer.”

Assessment:

Now let's find a partner and discuss our illustrations on how we think they are different from the illustrations inside the book and what parts of the illustrations we like from both our drawings and the drawings in the book. I also want you to tell your partner one encouraging message that you liked about their illustrations and how it added to The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

References:

Eric Carle, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”

http://www.thebestclass.org/uploads/5/6/2/4/56249715/veryhungrycaterpillar.pdf

Third Grade Giggles, “Visualizing Activities to Promote Active Reading”

http://www.thinkgrowgiggle.com/2020/10/visualizing-reading-strategy-lesson.html