When Things Just Work

Who knew something so simple would spark so much in the children. I LOVE that! We've been learning all about the different ways to build comprehension. We recently completed our learning about summarizing and have moved on to visualization. I love this book. It was the perfect link today for our visualization talk. We started with an activity here using four simple lunch bags. Each bag had one item inside. We talked about picturing things in our minds, but since we are just finishing up our unit on Helen Keller, this fit in nicely. Students had to feel instead of see what was in each bag. Then we made a picture of the item in our minds. We spoke about what we were picturing and how even though we had technically seen nothing, we could still visualize the item due to previous experiences we have had with these common items. This also tied in nicely with our unit on adjectives and we used some of them to describe what we were feeling inside each bag. The students in my class were really excited about feeling what was in each bag. And you and I both know that excited students equals high levels of learning. In the middle of my lesson, I altered things (I do that when a great idea hits me randomly). We took a blank white paper and folded it into fourths then numbered each of the fourths from one to four. Next, while reading the Bible story for today, we stopped every few minutes to do a quick sketch. We were really able to dig deep into visualizing and discus the images that our story was evoking in their minds. We talked about including feelings, etc. Simple, right? But very meaningful to my students today and they really seemed to connect and make sense of what we were learning. I just love moments like that.