1. Reading Strategies "Once you learn to read, you will be forever free." — Frederick Douglass

2. Visualizing Connecting Questioning Making Inferences Determining Importance Analyzing and Synthesizing

3. 1. Visualizing Reading JournalDue: September 17 2. Making Connections Reading JournalDue: September 24 3. Questioning Reading JournalDue: October 1 4. Making Inferences Reading JournalDue: October 9 5. Determining Importance Reading Journal Due: October 15 6. Analyzing and Synthesizing Reading Journal Due: October 22

4. “If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.” ---Albert Einstein

5. Visualization is… A reading strategy A way to help you understand what you read An important tool for reading fiction and non-fiction Making a picture in your mind

6. Visualization is directly related to language comprehension, language expression, and critical thinking.

7. How do you visualize? Use the words in the text to make a picture in your mind Use your background knowledge to help us visualize what is in the text Different people bring different background knowledge, and so they visualize differently

8. Try This The purple flowers bloomed, lifting their petals up to the sun. They were surrounded by the bright green lily pads that covered the surface of the pond. Can you picture this in your mind?

10. Why visualize? Visualization helps us to process text more accurately. We read more carefully and it helps us remember. It also helps us to figure out what is going on in the story

11. Prior Knowledge Sometimes we are not giving a full description of a person or setting. We must fill in the blanks with our background knowledge.

12. A great way to use our visualization strategy when reading our text is to sketch the pictures that are created in our mind. Think about practising this skill when you are reading short stories, novels, plays and poetry.

13. What have we learned? Visualization is an important reading strategy We need to use the author’s clues and our own background knowledge to create a picture of what is happening Everyone builds unique mental images

14. Let’s practice! "The barn was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay......It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows......It smelled of grain and of harness dressing and of axle grease and of rubber boots and of new rope. It was full of all sorts of things that you find in barns: ladders, grindstones, pitchforks, monkey wrenches, lawn mowers, snow shovels, ax handles, milk pails, water buckets, empty grain sacks, and rusty rat traps. It was the kind of barn that swallows like to build their nests in. It was the kind of barn that children like to play in."

15. Artistic Creation Journal 1. Create a collage that depicts all of the elements of the novel you have read up to this point. You can choose to focus on the setting, or characters or both. You can cut out pictures and words from magazines/ newspaper and the computer or create your own visual images. The entire piece of paper needs to be covered in images. Remember to use your background knowledge and author clues to “fill in the blanks”. For example, if they have not mentioned a physical description of the character then you can take creative license to create your own ideas of what they may look like. Write a short paragraph on the back describing your inspiration/ source of ideas for your work of art.