Key Information
Focus
When To Use This Strategy
Appropriate Group Size
Why use visual imagery?
- Generating an image while reading requires that the reader be actively engaged with the text.
- Creating mental images while reading can improve comprehension.
How to use visual imagery
Follow these few simple steps to provide practice developing students’ mental images:
- Begin reading. Pause after a few sentences or paragraphs that contain good descriptive information.
- Share the image you’ve created in your mind, and talk about which words from the book helped you “draw” your picture. Children can relate to the setting, the characters, or the actions. By doing this, you are modeling the kind of picture making you want students to do.
- Talk about how these pictures help you understand what’s happening in the story.
- Continue reading. Pause again and share the new image you created. Then ask your students to share what they see, hear, taste, smell, and feel. Ask what words helped them create the mental image and emotions. By doing this, you are providing children with practice with this new skill.
- Are your images identical? Probably not! This is a great time to talk about why your images might be different. Perhaps one child went on a school field trip or had a school assembly that changed the way they created the picture in their mind. Perhaps experiences you’ve had as an adult influenced what you “drew.” These differences are important to understand and respect.
- Read a longer portion of text and continue the sharing process.
- Once this is a familiar skill, encourage your students to use mental imagery when they are reading by themselves.
Resources
From Into the Book (Wisconsin Public Media), lesson plans that help students learn to visualize:
Article from Reading Rockets:
Watch: Improving comprehension through visualizing comparisons
As a comprehension strategy, visualizing helps students understand the true size of new objects by comparing them to familiar objects. (From the Balanced Literacy Diet: Putting Research into Practice in the Classroom)
Collect resources
Math
Teaching Shapes Using Read-Alouds, Visualization, and Sketch to Stretch from ReadWriteThink encourages strategic reading and real-world math connections. See example ›
Draw a Math Story from ReadWriteThink helps students move from the concrete to the symbolic. See example ›
Art
From the Art Junction website: Suppose you had a hat that would help you think like an artist. What would it look like? How would it work? Try to imagine such a hat in your mind’s eye. Once you have a mental picture of your “artrageous” hat, make it using a paper plate as a base and colored construction paper to create it’s form. It may help to draw a picture of your hat before you start. See example ›
Music
The San Francisco Symphony Kids’ Site offers an online radio that provides musical examples of drama, excitement, tragedy and triumph. The musical selections offer a great opportunity to pair visualization and writing. Simply select a station button, have kids listen and visualize, and then draw or write what they “see” in the music. See example ›
Differentiated instruction
For second language learners, students of varying reading skill, and younger learners
- Start with small bits of text. Gradually add more as students get more familiar with the strategy.
- Pair students, or organize them into small groups, for visualization work. Use a strategy like Think-Pair-Share to help students become more comfortable developing mental images.
See the research that supports this strategy
Gambrell, L., & Koskinen, P.S. (2002). Imagery: A strategy for enhancing comprehension. In C. C. Block & M. Pressley (Eds.), Comprehension instruction: Research-based best practices (pp. 305-318). New York: Guilford Press.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Mental Imagery in Reading: A Sampler of Some Significant Studies
Children’s books to use with this strategy
The Bunnicula Collection: Books 1 to 3
Aesop’s Fables
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
Red Sings from Treetops: A Year in Colors
Yummy: Eight Favorite Fairy Tales
Least Things: Poems about Small Natures
All the World
