Albert Einstein once said, “If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.”

Now, Einstein was a pretty smart guy, so it’s not hard to imagine how much your students struggle to understand what they read if they have trouble visualising.

Visualising is the reading strategy that helps your students create a picture in their head of what they’re reading. It’s almost as if your students are making videos or movies in their heads, all built from their background knowledge, their imagination, and the content of the text. And based on their past experiences, their imagination, and how they interpret what they read, different students can picture different things from the same text.

By creating a rich mental picture, students are able to engage directly with a text and create their own visual context that helps to scaffold their comprehension as they read.

Research shows that students who create strong mental pictures...

• Have better recall
• Create more connections
• Ask more questions
• Have a deeper comprehension of the text.
  
  

 

Visualisation with fiction and poetry texts

Visualising is particularly necessary once readers move from picture books into chapter books.

Visualising helps them to get a sense of characters (how they look and act) and where the author is setting the story. For fantasy and science fiction, being able to visualise all the imaginative ideas of the author is essential for understanding the text.

 

Visualising with non-fiction texts

Visualising is equally important for non-fiction texts because it can help students as they encounter new concepts and ideas. 

Students can envisage how scientific concepts or word-based mathematical problems work, and give added depth and meaning to articles about history, social studies, and their other subjects.

 

Tips for teaching visualising

• Encourage students to use all five of their senses to build a more vivid picture. What do they see, hear, smell, taste, feel? Do a group mind-map to help cover all the senses.
• Practice visualising with students by having them close their eyes and picture a scene you are describing (it could be made up, or you could read a description from a book), then have them add further details from what they imagined.
• Play a “soundscape” and have students create a mental picture of where they are and what they see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.
• With a text in front of them, have students point out the words that most helped them to visualise while reading. Have them compare with their peers to see if some words were more helpful than others, and why.
• When students are writing, have them visualise their setting using all their five senses. Encourage them to build these ideas into their work. Remind students that using descriptive words will help their readers to visualise and create a vivid picture.
• Check out our free visualising lesson and anchor chart to introduce this reading strategy to your students.

 

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Want a comprehension strategies resource for your whole class?

Try CSI Literacy Kits and CSI Chapters for mainstream classes, or Enhance Literacy for targeted teaching and intervention classes. These resources are complete with texts, lesson plans, collaborative learning, graphic organisers, and digital resources. Download sample texts from our resources.

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