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Lesson Plan
Use Your Mind and Visualize!
Help students learn the crucial reading strategy of visualizing. Visualizing is a key component of learning to infer from a text. Kids will love using their imagination and drawing pictures of their visualizations.
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Being able to visualize when reading fiction is an important tool for young learners as it helps to build essential fiction comprehension skills. In the reading and writing lesson plan Use Your Mind and Visualize!, kindergarteners and first graders will learn to use visualization and the five senses to help them make pictures in their minds and think critically about what they read and hear. Children will practice visualizing and describing various scenarios before getting a chance to illustrate on paper what they imagine in their minds.
Learning Objectives
Students will be able to draw what they visualize as they read and present their drawings to others.
The adjustment to the whole group lesson is a modification to differentiate for children who are English learners.
Introduction
(5 minutes)
- Call students together as a group and ask them to think about their last birthday or a birthday party they have attended.
- After giving students a moment to think about this, ask them to close their eyes. While their eyes are closed, tell them to think about what they saw at their birthday. Ask students to think about what they felt, smelled, heard, and tasted at their birthday party.
- Have students open their eyes and share with the group or a partner some of the things they saw, smelled, heard, felt, and tasted in their minds.
- Explain that today, they will practice visualizing as they read.
- Explain that this is something they already know how to do since they just did it. Today, they will learn to apply this skill to reading. Good readers use the strategy of visualization to help them make pictures in their minds and think about what they read.
Beginning:
- Review the five senses, referring to the work students did in the EL pre-lesson.
- Draw pictures of each sense (hand for touch, nose for smell, etc.) on the board.
- Have students use 1–2 sentences to describe the birthday scene, using sentence stems such as, "I heard ________."
Intermediate:
- Have students use sentence stems to describe the birthday scene, such as, "I heard ________" and "I saw ________."
- Ask students to work wth a partner to share their sensory noticings.