Good readers play a movie in their mind as they read. They are imagining and filling in details to complete the story. Whereas poor readers see only words and sparse pictures. Let’s play with this sentence: The dog chased the squirrel up the tree. What do you imagine? Look how many details are left to your imagination. Here are a few guidelines based on Aristotle’s Ten Categories of Being, which describe how we intelligently think about and comprehend the world around us.
WHO/WHAT, QUANTITY, QUALITY
What kind of dog? (size, color, demeanor, old, puppy, beagle or giant wolfhound)
What kind of tree? (Dogwood sapling or huge craggy oak, in a crowded forest or park)
What kind of squirrel?(young, old, gray, red, flying, crafty, slow, sleek or shaggy)
WHERE
Where is the tree? (Forest, neighborhood, mountains, dog park)
TIME/WHEN
What time of year? (spring, winter, hot, cold, breezy, snowing, stifling)
What time of day? (sunset, daytime) How long will this go on? (5 minutes, 1 hour)
What time period? (Past, present, future, is there an Indian watching or a Viking)
POSITION
What position are they in? (Standing, crouching, first limb or higher)
RELATION
Do these animals know each other? Do they do this often?
FEELINGS/REACTION
What are the squirrel and dog feeling? (playful, mischievous, terrified, angry)
What caused the scene in the first place and how will it end? Has it happened before?
As adults we have so much experience with dogs and squirrels and trees and situations that we are fully equipped to imagine many scenarios for this sentence. But children may need to be guided in this.
PROVIDE EXPERIENCES TO ENRICH READING As they read readers will create from their imaginations only what they are familiar with. Therefore, it is critical that experiences be provided either in person or with videos and pictures of unfamiliar topics, so children have the needed visual cues to imagine a scene. LOOK UP VIDEOS & PICTURES Give children what they need to imagine and fill in details for each story. I read to children with an iPad in hand so I can pull up videos and photos of new concepts. How sad is it when a hilarious story from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy when the boys are sledding with a pig only to realize your students haven’t seen snow, don’t know how fast sledding is and can’t imagine a real pig’s sounds, weight, and texture. They may know the basics of what a sled, pig and snow are… but how rich is that knowledge? Is it from a cartoon? How real is it to them? Looking up a video from a sledder’s perspective as they fly downhill and a video about pigs on a farm provides readers with the visuals necessary to see the fun in the story.
Today I was reading The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli that referenced monks singing, so we listened to “Sanctus” in Latin. We looked up medieval abbeys and what monks wore and how they copied scriptures and decorated the pages with beautiful drawings and gold leaf. We even looked up silly notes scribes wrote to each other in the margins, to see how they felt and see details of their daily lives. This may seem time consuming, but now what a rich movie can be formed with that information that also applies to future reading!
NARRATE Help your children develop rich full imaginations as they read by having them narrate to you what was just read. As you read to them or as they read to you, ask them to tell in their own words from memory what happened. Ask clarifying questions. Begin narrating after a few sentences and move to paragraphs and then chapters. Move from obvious facts about the text to underlying substratum themes, character development and life lessons. This is how to check what children understand, remember and relate to. Narration is one of the most powerful tools you have as you develop an insightful reader.
ANNOTATE Annotating is a great way for older readers to interact with a text independently, by writing summaries, asking questions, underlining key points, drawing what they imagined, and journaling what they read or answering insightful questions. This also causes them to pause and reflect on what was read and interact with it.
Readers will imagine what is age appropriate as they read. That also explains why reading about the terrifying spider, Shelob in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings’ The Two Towers is far less scary for children than watching a movie imagined by adults. We craft an image based upon our experience.
These reading strategies may help improve children be able to play a vivid movie in their minds as they read.
The mission of More to Grow Cognitive Development Training is to improve learning ability and function through cognitive exercises that meaningfully transfer to all educational and everyday life situations so individuals maximize their potential.
Darlene Lewis, darlene@moretogrow.com, https://moretogrow.com