Making Movies in Our Heads

 Visualizing is the reading strategy known as “Making Mental Images or Creating Mind Movies”.  It creates images in the mind as the student reads, processes and recalls what has been read.  Visualizing allows the reader to organize their ideas, to see the relationship among the ideas, and to make meaningful connections with them. 

Visualizing helps students to:

©      use personal prior knowledge to aid in comprehension

©      check their mental images with the text to gain a better understanding of the text

©      connect to what is being read

Graphic organizers assist students to build the relationship between what they are reading and what they are seeing in their heads.  They are the best ways for us to teach children how to organize information and make their thinking visible to others.  Making these connections to the text activates a student’s prior knowledge and aids in their visualizing ability.  Remember as you are using this strategy at home that everybody’s mental image may be different and that is okay because we all have different pieces of prior knowledge we are using to build our mental images.