Visualizing

One of my favorite reading strategies is visualizing. Students create a storyboard by illustrating the most important event from the chapter. We are currently reading an adapted version of A Tale of Two Cities. On each storyboard, students summarize the story, find the word of the day in the chapter, write out the sentence where the word was used and find a quote to support their illustration. We complied all over our storyboards into a summarizing book. When we are finished with the novel students will have the complete book summarized and illustrated. It will prove very helpful when they need to review for the test. They constantly refer back to their visualzing books. Instead of asking me about an event, word or character, they become more independent and refer to their own work for the answer. They can quickly locate the item on the storyborad or re-read their summaries. Here they can see the vocabulary word in context and answer their own questions.