Visualizing

Good readers make "movies in their heads" while reading. Visualizing helps us understand the text in a deeper way. It connects us to what we're reading. Today in class we read an excerpt from Charlotte's Web that describes Zuckerman's barn. While I read it aloud, I did a "think-aloud," explicitly describing to the kids what I was thinking. After the kids had a chance to read it themselves, we discussed what the barn looked like in our minds. We discovered that our images were affected by our background knowledge AND the text. We used our background knowledge and prior experiences with barns to create an image of Zuckerman's. All of our barns had certain elements (as indicated in the text), but in some ways our barns were different - all according to an individual's background knowledge. We learned that a reader creates meaning as he or she engages with text.

Here's Caroline's barn!