Jeri Lynn Martin
Rationale: It is important for children to develop reading comprehension strategies as they develop in their reading to help make their reading experience meaningful. There are small strategies that students can use such as visualization. This is an excellent comprehension tool when asking students to recall text. As the student reads they should be able to create a mental image in their head of what they are reading. Visualizing will allow the student to better answer questions about the text when they think back to their mental images. In this plan, students will begin to practice focusing on the process of visualization, and formulate the vocabulary they will need to add description and emotion to their poetry.
Paper (divide into 14 squares)
Copies of Messy Room by Shel Silverstein
Copies of A Box Can Be Many Things by Dana Rau
1. Explain visualizing to the students. “We are going to talk about visualizing today. Visualizing is a special strategy that we will use to help us remember things from a story. When you visualize things you think of what the person is saying and create a picture in your mind. It is important for us to visualize so we can monitor our comprehension. When we break things down we stop seeing what’s going on. Watch me as I visualize. I am going to close my eyes as I say the word mountain and tell you what I think of when I think mountains. I see snow, tall trees, birds flying in the sky, people skiing, log cabins, and I feel cold. Everyone close your eyes. I want us to visualize. When I say the word rain, what do you see? (students will call out what they see) what comes to your mind when I say rain forest? (students will give descriptions of what they see in the rain forest). Do you remember what the first word was we visualized? What was the second word? Great! Creating mental images in our minds helped us remember our words.
2. We will read the poem Messy Room. “We are going to read a poem together now that we know how to visualize in our heads. It is about a child who has a very messy room. Clothes, shoes, socks and all sorts of things are thrown all over the place. It is so messy the child does not even know who’s room it is. Your job is to visualize what his room looks like after I say an item that is making his room messy. I want you to draw as many as you can visualize in the boxes on your sheet of paper. Make sure to keep them in order the best that you can as I read the poem.”
3. Review the poem with the students carefully. Ask students, “What was the first item that was misplaced, second, third? What did the messy room look like to you? Students will come to the front of the class and share their visualizations, so each child can see how different everyone’s images can be.
4. To assess I will pass out copies of A Box Can Be Many Things. Students will read this short book silently and draw pictures as they read to help them remember the story. We will come together as a group and the students will share their drawings with the class. Students could be asked some of these questions after explaining their drawings:
1. Why did the mom throw the box away?
2. Why did the children want to keep the box?
3. What all did they make out of the box?
A Box Can Be Many Things: http://www.danameachenrau.com/index.php?id=8
Messy Room: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/shel_silverstein/poems/14818
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