a bad case of stripes comprehension questions

Here are few children’s books that provide many opportunities for visualizing: Through beautiful text and illustrations, kids can see how the main character uses his imagination and makes his own pictures in his mind during a class trip to the zoo.Īfter helping to define what visualization means, you might choose to use an additional mentor text for students to practice the skill as they read or listen. Amadou’s Zoo is a new book that lends itself nicely to showing what it means to visualize. The first step is to simply introduce to students what the concept of visualization actually is, and a read aloud is always a good place to start. So when kids are taught to make an intentional effort to visualize as they read or listen to a text, the results can be powerful.

But that is not always the case, especially for struggling readers. Visualization seems like one of those automatic things that “just happens” when we read. It’s easy to forget to explicitly teach this strategy. A reader who has the ability to make mental pictures of what they read or hear in a text will have a much better chance of becoming proficient in skills such as summarizing, identifying key details, and even higher level thinking ones, such as making inferences. Visualizing is so strongly related to memory and understanding, and one could argue that it is foundational for most other comprehension skills. If they were then asked to prioritize that list in order of importance, a strong case could be made for visualization to be near the top of that list. If you were to get a group of teachers in a room and have them brainstorm some reading comprehension strategies, I’m sure they could rattle off a long list.

A bad case of stripes comprehension questions