What is V & V?

V/V stands for “Visualizing & Verbalizing”. It’s a Lindamood-Bell program that’s geared to improve comprehension. In order to comprehend, we must create visual images in our mind. Some people have deficits in this ability. It may be a severe deficit or a mild one. Someone may simply not see anything when they’re reading (or being read to) while others do see but it’s murky, general outlines as opposed to vivid images. Others, esp. those with ADD or ADHD, DO see images but too many or they mistakenly focus on details rather than seeing the gestalt. “Can’t see the forest from the trees” would characterize this sort of person.

V/V provides a system to organize one’s thoughts by strengthening visual images. It uses 12 “structure words” when creating visual images. It also uses felt squares as part of a system to sequence one’s thoughts. It’s an inexpensive program that, for the price of the very readable book, can be used by anybody. All you need is the book, some little felt squares (but construction paper will work fine), and access to a copier. There are black line masters in the book.

It’s also helpful for people who make visual images just fine, but can’t remember them and for people who can’t keep them organized in their mind.

The first lesson entails a student looking at a coloring book type picture which the teacher doesn’t see. The student describes what s/he sees in the picture with the idea being that the student will describe it so well that the teacher then gets that picture in his/her mind. The teacher uses the structure words to ask questions about what’s in the picture.

The program progresses from describing a picture to describing a noun (here the person has nothing to look at but has to “see” the object in his/her own mind) to describing a sentence, to multiple sentences (here’s where the felt squares are used, one square per sentence in order to keep their sequence in one’s mind), to a paragraph, to multiple paragraphs. Using the structure words, the teacher’s questions eventually shift over at the multiple sentence level to asking higher order thinking questions of the sort that would be on a reading comp. test.

The structure words are: what, size, color, number, shape, movement, when, background, where, perspective, mood, sound. Initially, of course, the work is very concrete but as you progress through the program, a word such as perspective changes from “how am I looking at this picture - from above, from below, straight across?” to, in the case of a passage from a book, - “how does the protagonist in this story view this incident?”

The teacher makes sure that V/V work is practiced with the student listening to the teacher reading a sentence and then at various times the student might read the sentences aloud or silently. Since most schoolwork at the higher level is done by students reading silently, it’s important to practice that way too.

At the high school level, one works up to practicing note-taking and writing using the structure words as the guide for organizing one’s thoughts.

I’ve been wondering that too…
thanks for the answer!

Okay, now what is PG? :-)

Anne

Phono-Graphix, the reading method found in the book, Reading Reflex by Carmen and Geoffrey McGuinness.

http://www.readamerica.net/

Janis

Joan,

I have mentioned this before, but I am not sure whether it was you I asked. I have to choose between the video training for V/V or live training. The advantage to live training is obvious, but the videos are less expensive AND I could share them with other teachers, especially those at my child’s school! What do you think?

Janis

Get the videos they can be watched over for refreshers…and be shared with more people. sometimes I wihs I had some VV video’s so that I could brush up when I get rusty on my technique. It has been 4 years since my training…

If money’s a factor, by all means get the video. The actual classes are so much like the video - and they show huge chunks of the videos as part of the class - that you should do just fine with only the video and the book.

Thanks so much Patti and Joan! I value both your opinions greatly! I’ll get the videos!

Janis