Juli Kendall's Weekly
Reading Workshop Journal
A MiddleWeb Listserv Project
Self-selected members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List are joining
together to explore the Reading Workshop and other ideas about supporting
young adolescent readers. Juli Kendall, a reading teacher/coach in Long
Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion. Juli is also keeping
a weekly journal of her own Reading Workshop initiative. Find out more about
our project at our Reading Workshop homepage.
You'll find Juli's background article here.
Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded
in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin
to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.
Week #25
Visualizing What We Read:
Different Strokes for Different Folks
During Reading Workshop, you learn things.
Over time, as you teach, you discover whether your students like fiction
or nonfiction better, whether they enjoy "pretend" reading or
being lost in the book. You learn who their favorite authors are.
After almost seven months of reading aloud, mini lessons and independent
reading, I now know that our students like jokes and riddles, poems that
make them laugh, and the movie "Shrek." But before we started
using Visualizing as a reading strategy, how they felt about the movie
was completely unknown to me.
They revealed their secret the day we read Shrek, the book by William
Steig. Because our students are movie "junkies" and love visuals
of all kinds, we sometimes discover connections between what we are reading
and the movies we are watching when we're not at school.
According to Strategies That Work, "When we introduce visualizing,
we are likely to facilitate a conversation about books and movie adaptations
in an attempt to make the strategy concrete." (p. 97) I had no idea
I was discussing something they loved when I began comparing Shrek,
the book, with the movie. Immediately, I noticed something was amiss. "You
don't understand," they said. That's when I realized they had seen
the movie before they read the book.
What happened next, I can't be sure. But we headed into a conversation about
which came first, the book or the movie, and which was "correct."
I was stunned. Here was a teachable moment, but it turned out to be the
opposite of what I had expected. Who were these kids? I learned quickly
that Visualizing means "different strokes for different folks."
Making a picture in your mind
For us, getting started was easy. Ms. Thia, our Cambodian Educational Assistant
(we have many Cambodian students in our district), is an art student at
the local community college. She described Visualizing as an authentic activity,
something that she uses every day in her art projects and in her college
work. In addition, she gave us a "real world" definition for this
strategy -- a picture in your mind. The kids were fascinated.
To teach Visualizing, we planned a week of mini lessons, based on Chapter
8 "Visualizing and Inferring" from Strategies
That Work. Every day we read aloud some text, discussed it and then
drew or otherwise represented it with the objective of enhancing reading
comprehension.
Here are the lessons we used to teach the strategy of Visualizing and short
selections from several of the texts:
* Lesson 1 - Visualizing Wordless Picture Books
Carl Goes Shopping and Good Dog, Carl by Alexandra Day
* Lesson 2 - Visualizing Fiction
Chapter 3: "Escape" from Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
"And whenever the cat was given a fish-head to eat, the
barn would smell of fish."
* Lesson 3 - Visualizing Using All the Senses (from the point of view of
a Sea Turtle)
Into the Sea by Brenda Z. Guiberson
"I see, I hear, I can feel, I smell., I can taste"
* Lesson 4 - Visualizing Nonfiction
Shadow Ball: The History of the Negro Leagues by Geoffrey C. Ward,
Ken Burns, and Jim O'Connor (limited availability)
"The crowd stirs with anticipation as the Indianapolis
Clowns, an all-black team, take the field for their warm-ups. The second
baseman's glove snaps back when he snags a quick peg from first. He hurls
the ball to the third baseman, whose diving catch brings the fans to their
feet. Then a batter steps to the plate." p. 103
* Lesson 5 - Visualizing Poetry
All the small poems and 14 others
book
Such a
Bountiful
Box of
Tricks:
Packed
With the
Five senses,
The seven
Seas, the
Earth's
Four winds
And corners,
All fitted
Exactly in.
Our most effective Visualizing lessons were with the wordless picture books
and the nonfiction text. Having a Rottweiler as the hero of the "Carl"
books didn't hurt. In addition, pantomiming the baseball scene from Shadow
Ball with our students really made it concrete. "More, more, more!"
they chanted.
Incorporating the strategy
Then we watched to see how our students incorporated this new strategy.
On the first day, during Independent Reading, Leti started waving her hand
wildly. As I walked over to chastise her for "Not respecting the readers
around her," she pointed to the page she was reading. "Look, this
girl in the story is visualizing! She's making pictures in her mind."
What a great example she found.
"Sarah laughed. 'Thomas cannot build a house!' She had
a funny picture in her mind of solemn, long-faced Thomas carefully putting
the logs in place."
From The Courage of Sarah Noble by Alice Dalgliesh, p. 14
Since we're drawing our visualizations, we've talked often about how some
people enjoy this type of activity and some don't. I'm always reminded of
my son and his friends who, in their senior year of high school, christened
their AP English class, "AP Kindergarten." They hated it because
their teacher "forced" them to draw visualizations of their readings!
As they said, "This isn't easy to do with books like Heart of Darkness."
So we're trying to be careful. Different strokes for different folks.
See Juli's March curriculum map
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