Visualizing & Verbalization

I have been using visualizing and verbalizing with my students for over a year. I teach students with learning disabilities. It has been a wonderful tool in helping my students gain concept imagery. The kids love it too!

I am a PACE provider and use V/V with kids who have difficulty with comprehension. It has worked really well with kids ranging in ages from 8-18. I used it once with a girl who has English as a second language as well as other learning disabilities. The other big success was with an 18 year old with dyslexia who could not get into college because of poor ACT scores. After V/V integrated with PACE, he increased his scores by 7 points and was admitted to college. I find it easy to administer and that students begin immediately to see changes in what they understand and remember about their reading.

I have used V & V in both a classroom group and 1:1 clinical setting.

I find that with a classroom, one needs to select small groups based on homogeneous traits in describing what is seen and heard. IOW, don’t put your high verbals & visualizers w/the weak ones or the group depends on the ones w/higher skills to respond—poor ones are shy to respond.

I have done it in a whole-class (no small group) and it is very rewarding. However, the ones that may need more intervention need longer to practice verbalizing each type of task—you can have the ones that don’t really need it write a response. That keeps them busy on something meaningful.

If I have the luxury of small groups, I prefer that. Then we do some whole-class V & V activities based on our current literature. V & V is a super writing tool, too.

After we get to the point of V & V passages, I use it with literature we are reading. I also select passages from previously read books.

“Sarah Plain & Tall” has some excellent V & V passages—very descriptive—one can almost feel the prairie wind blowing.
“Tuck Everlasting” is one of my favorite books and Natalie Babbitt has some of the finest descriptive passages I’ve ever read—great for V & V talk & writing. Cynthia Rylant is great, too, for many, many kinds of writing instruction. (Reading Like A Writer, for example)

I do a lot of modeling of V & V and inferencing when I do a read-aloud. Fortunately, my visualization and other comprehension skills have always been a strong suit.

How much time are you able to spend on this? The book states that the minimum is 30 min/day, 5 days a week. In my school setting, that would be very difficult to do.

For kids who need a serious intervention, I do about 20 minutes in groups of 4-5 about 3X weekly. The other two days I devote to inferencing, prediction, summarizing & other comprehension-related topics with which these kids also have difficulty.

I really gauge it on my learners needs.

I was wondering how difficult the manual is to follow? I would like to do the program with my sister. It was recently discovered that she does no visualizing when she reads and is having a horrible time.

I am interested in purchasing the manual but don’t want to use it incorrectly.

thanks
K.

I was able to learn to use it without any training and long before I was a certified teacher. I did stay on pictures too long the first couple of times…Not a big deal. Just post some questions and you’ll be A-ok!