Reading Strategy: Visualize

1. Reading Strategy: Visualize “If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.” ---Albert Einstein

2. What is visualizing?

3. Visualizing involves picturing in your mind what is happening in the text.

4. When you visualize narrative text, you use sensory images like: • sounds, • physical sensations, • smells, • touch, and • emotions described in the story to help you picture the story.

5. Why is visualizing so important?

6. Visualizing heightens motivation and enjoyment of reading. • Reading can become more enjoyable if you imagine what it looks like. It is similar to creating a movie in your head.

7. How does this help…Visual learners? Kinesthetic? Auditory? Visualizing improves comprehension of narrative and expository text. • It helps to see it to remember it 

8. Being able to create images and mental models while reading is important to reading comprehension and engagement. In fact, without visualization, it is very difficult to comprehend.

9. As you read you create pictures in your mind of : • events and actions • characters and their features, clothing, etc. • settings and situations

10. Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

11. Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large. It is also a fact, that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place….. Let it also be borne in mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one thought on Marley, since his last mention of his seven-year's dead partner that afternoon… Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change: not a knocker, but Marley's face.

12. Readers may visualize unmentioned scenes or actions or details, for example, picturing characters when they were younger or older, seeing a setting in greater detail than it is described, etc.

13. They went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by lines of plain deal forms and desks. At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.

14. Readers may… visualize themselves in a scene or imagine meeting a character. feel emotions and may visualize in ways that heighten these emotions. use images and experiences from their own lives to help them see and experience the text.

15. Reading is . . . seeing and thinking!

16. Your Turn… Students may choose to visualize the following: • sounds • physical sensations • smells • Touch • emotions • events and actions • characters and their features, clothing, etc. • settings and situations • unmentioned scenes or actions or details (seeing a setting in greater detail than it is described) • your choice Margins should be filled to the best of your ability with a combination of drawings and written explanation when drawing is difficult to put on paper. You will not be graded on artistic ability. The purpose of this strategy is to make the reader SEE what they read to enhance comprehension.