visualization when reading

Hi Shirley,

I would like to recommend two books about comprehension, Mosaic of Thought by Keene and Zimmermann and Strategies That Work by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis. These two books go together and will show you how to turn those first graders into lifelong readers who make amazing connections to the books they read. These books will also help YOU make connections to the books you read and get you excited to teach comprehension.

You can check out www.readinglady.com to preview the books. Also, there are some excellent resources, like posters, to help you bring these ideas into your teaching. Just a quick note that these books, and the ideas presented can be used in any grade and any subject. If teachers of all grades helped students make connections to books in order to comprehend we would truly have a ‘nation of readers’.

Holly

‘How To Increase Your Child’s Verbal Intelligence’. This book attacks the comprehension problem from the top down.

The Lindamood-Bell Visualizing and Verbalizing program is excellent for developing the skill of making pictures or movies in their heads. It starts at a very simple level and builds to sophisticated skills. I would think that you would find the beginning skills very useful since your students are so young. They suggest training, but most people think that it can easily be understood and taught without the training.The complete kit sells for $100 or the book by itself is $50. The website is www. lindamood.com.

I bought the V/V book from LMB, which is clearly excellent. Since I am a psychologist, not a teacher or speech pathologist, I found the book assumed I knew more than I did about working with visual images. The book itself did not give me ideas of what to do when my son did the line drawings well but didn’t transition easily from the single word visualization to the three-sentence visualization. Of course, I had never taken the $700 2-day V/V workshop where I might have learned intermediate techniques.

I bought the IdeaChain from the “MindPrime” site ($240) and it is similiar to V/V. However this workbook is scripted and the developer is available by phone to answer questions and suggest additional strategies. This program breaks the early visualization tasks into much smaller steps before proceeding to words and then to 1-sentence visualization. My son must describe the details of a simple photo, and I must image it and give it back to him. We then check the photo together. Then the process is reversed and I describe a photo to him that he has never seen before. (The research on visualizing is showing that the same part of the brain that originally sees the image is the same part of the brain utilized to recall it. That is one of the reasons that becoming a good observer is so important.) My son is making progress, albeit slowly. For the first time this week he was able to tell me about a complicated scene from a T.V. program, and it made sense!! Lesson 3 of the workbook spends a lot of time on ‘direction,’ (up, down, in front, in back, 3 over from the left, etc.). When working this lesson, I discovered my son’s skills in understanding direction were fairly limited. I’ve been able to work on this with him over the last few weeks, and I am seeing progress.

The MindPrime site also lists various research articles from peer-reviewed journals on the topic of visualization as a component of memory and comprehension.

Anyway, regardless of the program used, I strongly support visualization as a component of remembering and understanding. The memory experts have known for years from practical experience that visualization is important for retaining information, and now the scientific research is supporting the same position.

Hi everyone! I haven’t been on this board recently due to having so many tutoring clients. Talk about a second job! I have so many on my waiting list that I’m having a problem with having time to do my day job, teaching. For those of you who know me, I have switched counties, I left Fairfax and went to Loudoun. I am now going to be teaching 11th grade and will be instrumental in developing a curriculum for the basic skills resource room. One of the components will be visualizing and verbalizing by Lindamood-Bell. I use this all the time in both my teaching and my tutoring. I am in the process of remediating a 7th grade boy who can’t visualize not only language but numbers. Lindamood-Bell has a companion piece for math called On Cloud Nine, visualizing math. It is just as good for math as V/V is for language. I was fortunate in being trained in both V/V and Cloud. It certainly helped in my presentation of both of these programs. If a child can’t visualize, he will have a hard time learning. My student (mentioned above), failed seventh grade because his visualization is so poor. Also, if a person can’t visualize, writing is almost impossible. I use V/V with Inspiration and Step Up To Writing to remediate writing skills. This combination has resulted in a lot of success for my students. I have found that most of my ADD students can’t visualize. This makes sense since most of these students can’t remember multiple instructions. Last year, I was fortunate to have the opportunity of taking one ADHD student completely through the entire V/V program. This included taking notes and outlining. He went from C’s and D’s to honor role in a year. I highly recommend this program combining it with those programs that I mentioned above along with Language Wise. Again, hi everyone!

What a wonderful recommendation for these programs. I am surprised to hear that you are using ADD instead of Phonographix. Why the switch, or are you using both? Congrats on your new job! Dawn

Hi Dawn, When I referred to ADD, I was referring to the condition of Attention Deficit Disorder not a program ADD. I only teach decoding using PG and then I use a lot of programs to teach comprehension, fluidity and vocabulary which all make up the ability for a child to actually read with comprehension. I also use the Super Speller (spelling component of PG) while they are learning how to decode. If a student can already comprehend after PG, I use V/V as a study skills program. I find it very effective. I wanted to just set the record straight and not confuse anyone. I am a special educator and I forget that everyone doesn’t know what ADD is. Sorry for the confusion. Still a die hard PG person, Shay.

Some years ago, I worked with a boy who had Kleinfelter’s Syndrome. This is a genetic disorder which entails a number of problems, particularly in language. With this boy, age 12, I was able to work up from Grade 1 to Grade 4 in reading in six months, a notable success. We started math later and I was just plumbing the depths of his confusion when the school board invented yet another program to put him into. The interesting point is that although the school claimed that he “knew” addition and subtraction and could do times tables up to the threes, when I started plumbing the depths I found (a) that he could not count accurately past six; (b) that “six” and “sex” sounded the same to him and he knew it was a bad word he wasn’t supposed to use, so he was unlikely to learn any numbers until that got cleared up; and (c) that he absolutely could not verbalize “before” and “after” relationships, so among other things, subtraction and spelling were insane mysteries to him. He was able to function very well in the real world; he managed his own personal care and his room, his mother saying that he was a neat-freak type, he could find his way around a city of 100,000 population even though he couldn’t read street signs, he babysat his younger brother, and he took apart and repaired bicycles. So he really could sequence extremely well, but he couldn’t bring that ability to his verbal functioning and therefore not to numbers or to spelling — he was stuck on a kindergarten level. The school “”psychologist”” (I use quotes because the man was such an obvious incompetent) missed this issue entirely and rated this poor kid as functioning on Grade 2-3 in math, obviously false, and said that the kid had no sequencing problems because he was able to put four pictures in order (yes, the kid was fine with concrete, just collapsed utterly on verbal and abstract.) When I asked the boy about “before” and “after” relationships, he drew a total utter blank. He could not tell you if you put your socks on before your shoes or after, or whether you had breakfast before supper or after.Again, he could DO these things and many more complicated, like putting a bicycle back together, perfectly well, he just couldn’t connect to this skill verbally. The reason I’m mentioning this here is that the description of the lessons on relationships such as over-under, beside-in front-behind, in-out, before-after, etc. rang a bell. Sometimes when parents and teachers come up to this kind of lesson in a program they feel that it is silly or unimportant or unrelated to reading or whatever, and they often skip over it to “save time”. In fact, they have just skipped over a major foundation block that is going to support much of the later structure, and years of time get wasted later trying to rebuild. It’s good to see programs addressing these issues. And please, don’t leave out parts of programs (especially math and cognitive skills programs) unless you have enough knowledge of the larger picture to know where the skill fits in.

Hi Shay,

I just ordered Step Up to Writing to use with my mildly dysgraphic 11yo this coming year for homeschooling.

I plan to order Inspiration also, but am unsure whether to get the kids version or the advanced version. Do you think the kids’ version would be enough for the first year of writing (5th grade level)? I know there is a learning curve associated with Inspiration, and we have so much stuff around here I want to be sure we don’t get bogged down with too much “prep” time before we can actually use it effectively. My dd is bright, has no problems with comprehension, complex relationships, etc., but her writing is simplistic and she almost never finishes anything. I am thinking it might be better to work with the kids’ version for a year before moving up to more advanced choices. What do you think?

Also, do you know anything about the course offered by the Institute for Excellence in Writing? It has gotten raves on the homeschooling boards.

Mary

Hi Mary,
To be quite honest with you, I didn’t know that there was a different version of Inspiration for the younger child, so I really can’t comment. What I do know is that my seventh graders could barely write a sentence and it worked wonders for their organization of writing assignments. I have heard about Excellence In Writing but since I found that ‘Step’ met all of my students’ needs, I didn’t search further. I have found that I could continue to look further at different programs but I have so much to do that when I find a method that works, I stick with it.

Sometimes less is more for us too. Think I’ll look at Step Up to Writing when it comes and maybe forget about Excellence in Writing until next year. Can’t do everything! I’ll just ruminate a little longer before ordering Inspiration.

Mary

Shirley,
Check out the Davis Learning Strategies kit at http://davislearn.com/
This was developed for classroom use with kids grades K-3, and is very easy to implement. It is specifically designed to be used in a group setting, as a supplement or complement to regular reading curriculum. It contains specific techniques to build comprehension skills - in fact, the reason the kit was developed was to fill in the visualization skills that you are describing.

I think you might find that this is exactly what you are looking for.

Best Wishes,
Abigail

Thank you for replying to my call for help! I will check out the Davis site. Shirley

Holly, I have these books, and yes they are great. Well worth having, but they do not address the problem of poor visualization. Shirley

Sandy, thanks for your info. on Lindamood.Bell. I am wondering if my school district will pay for me to take a course? Shirley

Pat, what do you mean by “imaging back” ? Can you explain a bit more about the method, just to give me an idea how to begin? Thanks . Shirley

My supervisor paid for training for myself and another LD teacher, and we were able to share the expense of the motel by rooming together. I heard that they are bringing LB into our county to train 20 more teachers this summer. Good Luck!

Hi Shay. I first heard about Phono-Graphix from you on this board. I spent all of last year trying to get my VP to pay for me to take the training. I am finally going next week! So I was a little bummed when I thought you had switched. Thanks for the clarification.

Dawn

Shirley, you asked about a website where you could get more information about visualization. Look at www.understandmore.com and click on the little brain-man icon. This website has a good — and simple — explanation of the role of mental imaging in comprehension and communication. There is also a profile of the student who is weak at mental imaging. The program for remediation is MindPrime’s IdeaChain program, the one mentioned above by Pat.

Shirley,

Contact me at my e-mail address “[email protected]” and I’ll share my precise experience with imaging.

Pat

Shirley,

Contact me at my e-mail address “[email protected]” and I’ll share my precise experience with imaging.

Pat