Mentor Texts: Visualizing

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Are you a visual person? Would you rather read a book or listen to one? Guess what! Either way you are visualizing the text. We visualize all day long! When I think about the ham, cheese, and pickles sandwich with chips that I want for lunch, I imagine it in my head as I walk to the fridge to make it. Not exactly intentionally, but we visualize our day as we do it! I definitely visualize my outfit as I pick out the first part of it. Don’t you?!

Authors have an incredible talent of enriching text to awaken all five of your senses. As readers, we need to soak this all in to get the best understanding and experience with the book as possible.

Engage Your Students in Learning Visualizing

I teach my students reading strategies with a concrete understanding to help them to internalize and understand the meaning. Meet Victor The Visualizer! He helps us turn descriptive text into visual masterpieces!

visualizing, reading instruction, comprehension strategies

Victor The Visualizer is part of my Comprehension Crew instructional strategy. The Comprehension Crew is a group of characters each representing an essential reading skill. Each character has a profession, song, gesture, and prop that provide a concrete representation of the reading skill. These characters are used to model and reinforce each skill both in real life situations and in text. The character helps students to understand, remember, and intentionally apply skills as they are reading. This teaching format helps you provide intentional, concrete, and meaningful experiences with connection for your students. The reading character helps the skill COMES TO LIFE for the students and make it fun!

While Victor reads, he is consistently pausing to notice the sensory and descriptive words in the text. These clues help him to make a mental image of the text as he is reading. Victor also notices details in the text’s pictures that show more about the story than the words! He provides students with the confidence for summarizing texts to ensure their understanding.

Click on the picture above to see this resource pack. The product includes a model lesson to teach visualizing with any text and an abundance of visualizing activities! Victor can start helping you teach visualizing today!

Teaching Visualizing With Mentor Texts

visualizing, reading instruction, comprehension strategies, comprehension crew

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Teaching visualizing is so much fun!! Click here to read more about how I guide my students to using visualizing in their reading.

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