Get the Picture?

During Reading Workshop this week, we've been working on a new strategy to boost comprehension. The fancy way to describe this strategy is "Visualizing to Understand", but the kid-friendly version is "Get the Picture."  As the children delve into books that focus on settings, characters or problems that are unfamiliar to them, they can create a mental image of a particular scene in order to increase their understanding of the story. In creating this mental image, they will rely on the descriptive language in the book as well as on their own background knowledge.  As a whole class, we worked on "Getting the Picture" after reading a few chapters of Tonight on the Titanic.  Next, the children used their Independent Reading time to put the strategy to use as they read appropriately leveled books. As they read, they marked a particular scene with a Post-It Note and later sketched a picture on their strategy sheet to boost their understanding of that part of the book.  These photos show an enlarged version of the "Get the Picture" strategy sheets that the children have been using.