1. What is visualizing?
This Powerpoint is designed to introduce students to the reading strategy of visualizing. Through examples, discussion, and guided practice, students can learn more about how to visualize as they read.
Visualizing takes some practice. Many adult readers visualize without even being aware of it.

2. Making a picture in your mind
Visualizing is…
A reading strategy
A way to help you understand what you read
An important tool for reading fiction and nonfiction
Making a picture in your mind

3. How do you visualize?
You use the words in the text to make a picture in your mind
It’s like seeing a “movie in your mind”
Visualize this:
A green tractor
This is a very simple picture, but it’s a good beginning. More complex visualizing is ahead! If you teach in farm country, like I do, you may have students who start talking about which brand of tractor they visualize here!

4. Your mental image
How was your mental image different from the one on the screen?
We use our background knowledge to help us visualize what is in the text
Different people bring different background knowledge, and so they visualize differently
The discussion that takes place during this presentation is important. Encourage students to share the prior knowledge that they brought to this task. What if they had never seen a tractor? How would that change their mental images? Emphasize that students must be pulling on their background knowledge as they visualize!

5. Try this:
The purple flowers bloomed, lifting their petals up to the sun. They were surrounded by the bright green lily pads that covered the surface of the pond.
Can you picture this scene in your mind?

6. Did your mental image look like this?
The purple flowers bloomed, lifting their petals up to the sun. They were surrounded by the bright green lily pads that covered the surface of the pond.

7. More practice! Make this picture in your mind:
A grassy path led into a garden of tall grasses, black-eyed susans, and purple coneflowers .
Your students may not be familiar with black-eyed susans or purple coneflowers. Don’t worry—this will add to the discussion. Could they make an inference that these are flowers? What clues could lead to this?

8. Was your mental image like this?
A grassy path led into a garden of tall grasses, black-eyed susans, and purple coneflowers .
If your mental image was different, why? What did you add or change? How did your background knowledge affect your mental image?

9. Now try this!
The sleek, modern museum rose at the end of the parking lot. A tower that looked just like an airport control tower glistened in the center. To the right curved a silver, round building. A tree was to the left.
You may want to have students sketch what they visualize here to keep them actively engaged in the presentation.

10. How did you do? Which details were probably most important?
Which were the easiest to visualize? Which were the hardest?
Note: This is the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Use this chance to talk about how difficult it is to put pictures into words. (I had a very hard time writing the paragraph to describe it!) What was missing in my description? What would students like to have seen?
Obviously, one of the key details in the paragraph is the control tower. The tree is less important, because it isn’t as related to the museum.

11. The right picture?
Because each person has unique background knowledge, everyone will visualize differently
However, you need to make sure that you are using the text clues to visualize
This is very important to share with students. There will always be some variation in their visualizations, which is fine. It is important for readers to stick to the author’s clues, however.

12. For example…
This picture would not match the details of the paragraph at all!
The sleek, modern museum rose at the end of the parking lot. A tower that looked just like an airport control tower glistened in the center. To the right curved a silver, round building. A tree rose to the left.

13. This is neat, but why? Why visualize? Here are three reasons:
Visualizing helps us to process text more actively. Because we have to use our prior knowledge to visualize, we are reading more carefully
Visualizing can help you to figure out what is going on in the story
Visualizing is fun!
This is the end of the basics of visualizing; the next slide picks up with talking about prior knowledge.

14. Using prior knowledge to visualize
Visualizing is making a picture in your mind based on the text. But authors don’t explain every single detail. Sometimes, you need to fill in with your background knowledge.

15. What do you have to fill in with your background knowledge?
Try visualizing the scene below:
Far in the distance, a group of ponies huddled in the surf, flicking away the biting insects with the swishing of their tails. Excited visitors watched them from the further up the beach, taking pictures and chatting.
Once again, you may want to have students sketch this scene to keep them engaged. Depending on your location, words like “surf” and “beach” may be very familiar or less familiar to your students, affecting how they visualize.

16. Here it is!
Did you picture sand? Even though it wasn’t mentioned in the text, your prior knowledge of the beach helped you to make an accurate mental picture.
If you’ve been to Assateague, you were probably able to picture the ponies. If you haven’t, your mental picture was probably different.
This picture is from Assateague National Seashore. You may want to talk with students about how authors can adjust their descriptions to match their readers’ needs. For example, writing for an audience that has never seen the beach is different from writing for an audience that lives along the beach. (My students are all pretty familiar with the idea of Assateague; in a given year, about half of them have been.)

17. Pay attention to an author’s clues!
Sometimes what we read will not match our prior knowledge. Read this:
The fences and fields of Shelburne Farms stretched down the gentle slope toward the barn.
I find that this is where my students really have problems. They will read something that the author says, make one mental image, and then hold onto that mental image, even when the text tells them otherwise.

18. But…
The fences and fields of Shelburne Farms stretched down the gentle slope toward the barn.
But this was not a regular barn. Instead, it looked more like a palace. One round turret towered over the side wall.

19. Here is the clue!
The fences and fields of Shelburne Farms stretched down the gentle slope toward the barn.
But this was not a regular barn. Instead, it looked more like a palace. One round turret towered over the side wall.
Draw students’ attention to the fact that the author very clearly signals that what is being described may not match with the reader’s prior knowledge. Many students skip over these clues, not realizing how important they are.

20. What a difference!
Notice that this barn does not look like the barns that you have in your prior knowledge. If you kept on thinking about a regular red barn, you would miss out on an important detail

21. You can visualize whenever you read
Try sketching what you visualize based on the dialogue below.
“What a day for a class trip!” Ricky said.
“I know. I can’t wait to get back in the boats and go canoeing some more,” Ana replied.
“I just wish it weren’t so cold,” Ricky sighed.
Here, students are asked to transfer what they have learned about visualizing to a text that is more like typical fiction. Often, readers need to make mental pictures based on the dialogue in a text. Pause after each part of the dialogue to talk about how mental images change. What do students visualize after reading about the class trip? How does their mental image change after the second piece of dialogue? What does the last comment from Ricky mean?

22. What are some things that you drew in your picture?
Based on your prior knowledge and the clues in the text, what did you put in your picture?
Canoe
Lake
Forest
Students
It’s important to talk about the big ideas that students sketched in their pictures. What goes along with the text? For example, a school bus in the distance might go along with the text. However, an elevator certainly would not!

23. Here’s one idea Does this look like the scene you pictured?
What elements are similar? Different?
This is an actual picture from an actual class trip. The weather was pretty chilly—a windy 50 degrees on the last day of March! But the students had a wonderful time.
Looking at pictures and comparing them to mental images is fun. Be sure that students don’t believe that there is a “right” and a “wrong” visualization—the passages they read simply didn’t have enough detail to explain everything in the scene. What’s important, though, is that they have the big idea. This makes information available for predictions and inferences. If the text says that one of the students lost his balance, for example, the reader may pull on prior knowledge and the visual image to guess that the student could fall into the lake.

24. What have we learned? Visualizing is an important reading strategy
We need to use the author’s clues and our own prior knowledge to build a mental image
Everyone builds unique mental images
Authors leave clues to let us know when our prior knowledge will not be a help
Visualizing is a great reading strategy to teach. Kids find it intrinsically motivating to try to make mental pictures as they read. For students who simply call words, visualizing is one of the most effective ways I’ve found to encourage them to slow down and really process the text.
If you’d like to know more about visualizing, check out my book The Forest AND the Trees, published by Heinemann. You’ll find an entire chapter about visualizing, the connection between visualizing and inferring, and an easy visualizing assessment to use with students.
The Forest AND the Trees: Helping Readers Identify Details in Texts and Tests. Emily Kissner