Visualizing FREEBIES!

This year is the 75th anniversary of one of the most incredible stories ever told. As a girl I walked around telling strangers my name was Dorothy, as in Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. My sister was born when I was four and I’ve been told many times that as I was riding the elevator up to see her for the first time an elderly lady asked me my name. When I told her it was Dorothy she couldn’t believe it because her name was Dorothy too and Dorothy was such a rare name for a little girl. My grandparents sadly had to break it to her that I also had imaginary friends named Tin Man, Todo, Scarecrow and Lion.

I’m sure you can imagine my excitement when I found out that our district high school would be performing The Wizard of Oz this November! I might have squealed a little. Before the play I am going to read the original story to my class. It’s going to be the perfect way to practice the reading skills and strategies we’ve been working on before our first big novel study.

We began with making THICK connections and followed it up with visualizing. Next week we will begin working on inferencing. We spent about a week and a half on connections and visualizing. Theres a lot more to inferring so we will spend more time here.

For visualizing we started with one of my favorite poets Jack Prelutsky. If you don’t have a copy of the Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant you need to one!

Each poem describes a creature. These creatures are usually a blend of an animal and a household appliance or favorite food. The panthermometer for example is quite the little mix of a panther with a thermometer for a tail.

I began by reading a few of my favorite poems from the book and we shared what we visualized and the words that helped make this image in our mind. Next I handed these out.

Without showing the pictures I read each poem through a few times and gave the kids time to sketch their images. After both sketches I gave some time to add color. Once everyone had time to bring their images to life I finally showed them Jack prelutskys images. This was of course their favorite part. We talked a bit about how even if what they visualized was a bit different that doesn’t make them wrong. Authors want readers to be able to create their own images, characters and scenes. It’s part of what makes reading so enjoyable!

Another favorite activity in this study was creating our own images for a bad case of the stripes.

This was super simple but they LOVED it! When this lesson was done I knew that not only did my kids understand the importance of creating images they enjoyed it. Kids were coming to me to share parts of stories that came to life for them. There wasn’t anything special about this lesson other than the way I delivered it. I was excited in every way and I read in that special way that builds so much anticipation for readers.

You can snag this FREEBIE just by clicking the picture. In writing we were working on restating the question in our answers and citing evidence from the text so there is a page in addition to visualizing.