Easy Tips For Teaching The Visualizing Reading Strategy

Visualizing Reading Strategy teacher tips title image

Visualizing in Reading is a skill that comes naturally to fluent readers. We do it without thinking. But how do we teach readers to visualize? It is a reading strategy that needs to be taught explicitly and modeled for students. Keep reading to learn about essential tools for teaching the visualizing reading strategy.

How to Teach the Visualizing Reading Strategy?

Learn how to teach the visualizing reading strategy with these helpful teacher tips and resources. These essential tools will make teaching visualizing much easier for you and more effective for your students. Not only will they be successful using this reading strategy but they’ll also have fun practicing!

Visualizing Tools

When teaching comprehension reading strategies, such as visualizing, there are some essential tools we always need. These teaching materials include mentor texts, anchor charts, and graphic organizers.

Visualizing Books

Poems are ideal to use when practicing the visualizing reading strategy. You’ll also want to find excerpts from fiction stories with descriptions of the setting and/or characters. Here are some of my favorite visualizing books to use as mentor texts.

Visualizing Anchor Chart

Anchor Charts are an essential tool for introducing a new reading strategy. Displaying an anchor chart during your minilesson helps keep your instruction focused. It can also serve as a visual reminder of the reading strategy during small group instruction, literacy centers, and independent reading.

Some information you might include on your Visualizing Poster:

Explanation of the strategy
What it means to visualize
A “Good Readers Can…” statement using kid-friendly language
Thinking stems such as “I am picturing ___ because ___.”

Visualizing Question Stems

When planning your visualizing reading strategy lesson plans, it is helpful to record specific prompts you want to use. These can be applied to any text during whole group or small group lessons.

What do you see in your mind as you read the text?
What words or phrases in the text help you visualize?
How does your background knowledge help you visualize?
How is your mental image similar to/different from your buddy’s image?

It can be helpful to keep a strategy cheat sheet with prediction prompts that you can use for any text. I like to keep a list of them at my small group table to use during our lessons.

Be sure to provide students with sentence stems to help them practice visualizing. These sentence frames are especially valuable to primary learners and English Language Learners. It can be helpful to post them in a place where students can easily refer to them to guide their discussions and written responses.

In my mind, I see…
The words ___ help me see [character, setting]…
The words ___ help me see, taste, smell, hear, feel…
I am picturing ___ because…
The text helps me picture…
My mental images helped me understand the story by…

Visualizing Graphic Organizer

Students can practice visualizing with a graphic organizer during small groups or literacy centers.

Save time by creating a Reading Graphic Organizers file box to keep at your small group table. That way you always have copies ready for students to practice the skill!

Readers’ Notebook Page and Study Guide

A readers’ notebook page can remind students of the strategy, graphic organizer, and sentence stems to use when visualizing.

Print a copy that they can use for additional practice at home.

Visualizing Bookmark

Students can keep a visualizing Reading Bookmark in their book boxes to remind them of the strategy during independent reading.

Visualizing Activities

While these tools are all scaffolds for students as they learn how to visualize, you may be looking for more specific activities to teach the skill. Be sure to check out the corresponding post with Activities for Visualizing in Reading that your students will love!