Sarah Rybicki Visualization Unit

My unit was built around my students using visualization as a reading strategy to better comprehend the text at hand. Overall, I absolutely loved my unit and so did my students from what I could tell. We all really love making meaning, and that’s what my first extended lesson touched on. We looked at paperboy and pictured a little boys paperboy route. We learned how to start to listen to the authors word choice and text, and took those words to help us create these mental images. Some of my students, drew pictures of what they visualized that were pretty similar to what the illustrator drew them as. They drew their favorite part and took great pride in their artwork and their thinking. However the kids who struggled to come up with a drawing, were my students who had a hard time picking out a word that helped them visualize what was occurring in the text. I have each students write down words that helped them visualize the text the second time I read it to them, and some kids had a hard time coming up specific words or phrases. Furthermore, they had a hard time explain what they were picturing. I adjusted my teaching for them and started to explain and model my own thinking regarding what I visualized, based off of my background knowledge, and the images the author’s text created. This definitely seemed to help, even my students who displayed all clues of comprehension. It really highlighted how I look my past experiences AND the text to help me, which seemed to help everyone with visualizing while examining the word choice used.

A couple of lessons later, I began my “Voices in the Park” lessons I formulated. We looked at the text (I typed up each voice for every student to have their own copy), uncovering a voice a day at a time. The students were under the impression that they were helping me figure out what the pictures once displayed, since my little sister cut out all of them! My favorite book was ruined and I wanted them to use their handy dandy skill, visualization, to help me repair the damage. I explained that there are four voices in the book, and I want them to look at, listen, and examine the text, to try to discover what the character looks like and how each character relates to each other. After every voice we filled out a chart and we drew how we pictured this character.

At first, I was extremely worried. The students weren’t responded to my preplanned questions and they couldn’t explain what they pictured, they probably didn’t even know what to picture at first. However, once I modeled what the words caused me to think, and what they text reminded me of from my prior knowledge, they caught on. They learned how to take a phrase like “I was planning what we were going to have for dinner that night”, and think, “this must be an adult, and it might even be a mother, because I know my parents provide dinner for me.” By the fourth voice, my students really got the hang of this strategy. The connections my students made by just listening to the text, and the pictured they produced after our classroom discussions and investigations, were astounding. We all were so excited, and so proud of each other. We had so much fun. These pictures were a fantastic way of assessing their progress with this strategy, and we learned that not only can we all create mental images to help us understand text, we can talk about these pictures, we can write about these mental images, and we all have unique ways of seeing things, because we have all experienced completely different lives!

The students who struggled were my students at really low reading levels, so I pulled them up to sit with me as I helped them with their highlighting, filling out their chart and really guided them through the whole project by explaining how I thought.

An alternate reason for my students performance could be that they have always been able to easily visualize. It comes easier to some, especially more than others, and we had focused on visualizing for two weeks. Furthermore, they could have already read the books before, which I know was the case for the paperboy. For voices in the park, my lower students could have been too dependant on my thinking and my stronger students thinking.

I learned that my students, LOVE being detectives. Exploration was huge with them, once they made connections, especially without my assistance, they were smiling form ear to ear because they were so proud. I also learned that having them sit at their seats was also beneficial. My “Voices” lesson, helped me realize this, and I plan to make my lessons with a variety of different spot to listen and perform the task at hand. Normally we also go to the back rug for literacy and always to writing and drawing at our desks. But when I allowed my students to write at the rug with clipboards, I allowed them to listen to read alouds at their desks, and I allowed them to follow along as I provided individual copies for each student to follow along. I notice this variety ultimately resulted in better behavior and an over all improvement in everyone’s participation. This makes sense because as a learner, I also like variety, as my attention span also struggles with repetition.

I plan to integrate visualization with our next unit, making inferences, with my students who need additional support. I also plan to have these students draw pictures of what they read frequently, which will be easy for me to do because this concept is always presented in their monthly book logs. I also plan to consistently model the way I visualize, and why certain words make me think and picture certain things.

If I were to teach these lessons again, I would definitely not consistently do the same thing for each voice. Even though my students were able to perform our task at hand without my guidance the entire time, I could tell we were less enthusiastic by the last day. I could do this by choosing different approaches to examining the text. Instead of always making it a whole class experience, I would implement book club methods, or even have them investigate the last voice on their own and then come back as a whole group. I would definitely not have my students who struggled with these lessons do this, but my higher students could work independently while we had a group meeting on the rug with my other students. I would also have higher students work with lower students, and have more preplanned partner shares. I normally let my students pick their own partners, but I think preplanned partners would benefit my students, as I know now who works best with who, behavior wise and performance wise.