This week I introduced visualizing to my little ones with a super easy and powerful lesson! Visualizing is such an important comprehension standard in primary grades! As our students delve into chapter books, and more challenging plot lines, they MUST visualize to able to understand the text. Though it happens naturally for us, we can’t forget our students need to be taught what it means to visualize! When we give a name to a strategy, they are more likely to use it comfortably. Throughout the year, as I’m reading aloud to students, I make sure to think aloud and model this strategy! Here are some sentence stems I might use and teach to my students! I also included a anchor chart with the definition. (You can grab all the freebies at the bottom of this post!)
To solidify the strategy, we used this perfect poem from Jack Prelutsky! It is perfect for visualizing, and the kiddos really love it! They always freak out at the end when they realize what it is!
Now for the lesson! I chose to use manilla paper (prefolded in thirds), but I also included a printable version for you to use at the end! The should label their paper before, during, and after.
First, just show the title of the poem and have them draw their mental image. I LOVE seeing all their drawings…they’re always so unique! (I made all these fancy printables after this lesson, so I just typed it up quickly in Word on my projector!)
Continue to add more of the poem and have them add their “during” drawing.
Make sure you give them enough time to do a detailed drawing. Usually I tell my students to sketch quickly, but for this lesson, the important thing is that they’re really visualizing…including the details! I gave my students about 4-5 minutes for each time. (You can tell them to draw a small picture to save time…just make sure to encourage them to add detail!)
Finally, show the entire poem and let them finish their drawing!
Here are two examples of my student’s completed work. At the end, be sure to have students discuss their mental image using the sentence stems! It’s important they know that our mental images are our own…they might be different for different people and that’s okay! But what matters is that we are thinking deeply about the text and picturing it in our brain!
As promised, I have lots of freebies that go with this lesson. You can grab them by clicking the picture below.
I hope this lesson is helpful to you! Let me know if you try it out! 🙂
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This looks wonderful Haley, a quick lesson for visualizing, especially for ELL students. How can I download it?
Thank you Maria! 🙂 You can click the images to download 🙂
Love this resource—however, the poems in your download reads “its eyes AND large and green”—I don’t see a correction in the download. Are you able to fix them for both the poem and the projectable versions?
It’s fixed now! 🙂
I still don’t see a correction, what a shame! I would also love to use with ELL little ones! It is such a nice picture!
It’s fixed now! 🙂
Great! It looks awesome!
Love this lesson idea. I’m searching for a lesson idea for a demo lesson for 3rd grade. Wondering if this idea can be adapted and if you have any ideas for doing so. Thanks.
Yes I think so! You could definitely follow the same format with a more challenging poem too!