Metacogitive Reading Strategies: Part 2 Visualization What Good Readers Do to Build Meaning From Text

Let’s Review! What’s metacognition? –Thinking about your thinking –One type of metacognitive thinking is hearing the voice in your head when you read. Great readers have trained the voice to say certain things that help their comprehension! Activating Schema –What is “schema”? Prior knowledge –What are the ways we can connect what we read to our schema? Text-to-self, text-to-text, text-to-world

Let’s Review! Why is connecting your reading to your schema valuable? –It helps us remember (file) information, feel empathy (feel with the character), and understand How do I make connections? –“This reminds me of…” –“This makes me think of…” –“This sounds just like…” –“This is similar to…”

And Now Presenting Our Newest Strategy…

Crafting Sensory and Emotional Images! Good readers create sensory images in their minds as they read. They even think BEYOND the sensory information that’s directly stated to craft their own detailed pictures to include… –Visual images –Auditory images –Tactile images –Taste images –Smell images –EMOTIONAL connections rooted in schema

How does visualization help our comprehension? 1. Great writers don’t tell us. They show us. We can then make discoveries (inferences) based on the images they craft. –Elizabeth lost all of the rosy color in her full, vibrant, illuminated cheeks and became sallow and jaundiced with deep, lightless purple nothingness for eyes and sharp, unfriendly sunken cheeks that hung on her face like a heavy burden. Most days she did not move from her stale, worn bed where she lay in a motionless, expressionless heap staring at a damp, dark spot in her ceiling caused by water dripping from a leak in her upstairs neighbor’s tub that she thought resembled an old man.

How does visualization help our comprehension? What do we discover about Elizabeth from the image the writer crafted? –Wasn’t it more fun to discover her intense sadness from images than if the writer had simply told us “Elizabeth was sad?” We can do this in our own writing! We have to start noticing it in the writing of others first to see how to do it well!

How does visualization help our comprehension? 2. When we craft images, we can immerse ourselves in our reading to engage in the text more deeply and make reading memorable.

Let’s Practice! How do I craft visual and emotional images? “This makes me see…” “This makes me hear…” “This makes me taste…” “This makes me smell…” “This makes me feel (tactile)…” “This makes me feel (emotional)…”

Why Does it Matter? Crafting visual and emotional images facilitates: –The ability to live the text! SO much more enjoyable! –Retention of text. (We remember what we live so much better than what we read.) –More powerful, more insightful, more skilled writing. (Show, don’t tell!)

The End! …or is it?