Visualizing

I know it's been a while, but here's a simple (and I think a great) activity regarding visualizing. I taught my fourth graders about visualizing when they read and write. This strategy is very important for ELL's. They usually tend to just write simple sentences so I tried to challenge them with this strategy. After introducing the concept, I wrote two very simple sentences on the board: My cat slept and The man cried. My kiddos had to rewrite the sentences in a way that I could create a mental picture in my head, aka. visualize. I had them write their sentences on dry-erase boards. Here are a few examples:

 This guy wrote two different versions (going above and beyond = love it). 

(The poor man cried because he was poor but someone gave him a home and food to eat so he cried/The poor man cried because he collected money for Takis but there were no more.)

 (The poor man cried because he was a hobo and he lived in a dumpster and he had to eat garbage).

(This one is written very nicely, so no need to translate :)

Compared to what they have been writing, these are pretty good. I know they all still need a lot of work but we're getting there.

We will have a little more practice tomorrow with visualizing. They will each write several sentences and then they will read it to a partner. The partner will then draw a picture of what they are visualizing. We'll see how that goes. :) Good night!