MorningStar’s Home Education News

By Mimi Rothschild

It is crucial that homeschooling children perceive and understand what they read, no matter if they’re in first grade or twelfth grade.  The ability to comprehend text is an absolute necessity for students in the current fast-paced competitive digital world.  One way homeschoolers can improve their reading comprehension is by visualizing.  Read all about visualizing below in this great article I recently discovered.

What Is It?

Visualizing refers to our ability to create pictures in our heads based on text we read or words we hear. It is one of many skills that makes reading comprehension possible.

Why Is It Important?

Visualizing strengthens reading comprehension skills as students gain a more thorough understanding of the text they are reading by consciously using the words to create mental images. As students gain more deliberate practice with this skill, the act of visualizing text becomes automatic. Students who visualize as they read not only have a richer reading experience but can recall what they have read for longer periods of time. (Harvey & Goudvis 2000)

Visualizing text as it is being read or heard also creates personal links between the readers/listeners and text. Readers who can imagine the characters they read about, for instance, may become more involved with what they are reading. This makes for a more meaningful reading experience and promotes continued reading.

How Can You Make It Happen?

Visualizing is a skill that can be helpful in many domains, and while it is often associated with teaching early readers, even experienced readers can benefit from practice with this skill. When selecting a text for a visualizing activity, start with a piece that contains descriptive language and strong verbs and that lends itself to conjuring vivid images. It is not necessary to start with an entire book-even a well-crafted sentence or short paragraph can provide a rich springboard for a visualizing lesson.

Starting Small

To begin a series of lessons that will focus on improving visualizing skills, you might choose to start with a short passage taken from a text or of your own creation. For instance, the following sentences could be used to spark discussions:

Joan could barely believe her eyes. All these gifts were for her! She had never seen so many packages, not even on all her birthdays combined!

After listening to or reading the sentences once or twice, students can discuss the mental images created by the sentences. Students will likely differ in their descriptions of the scene. For instance, some may picture a small child surrounded by stacks of gifts. Others may imagine an older girl in front of a table piled with presents. There is no single correct answer, and those three simple sentences, though not particularly rich in detail, do offer enough information for the reader or listener to begin to form a mental picture.

Group Activities

Students can work on their visualizing skills as a whole class or in small groups. One way to challenge young students to improve their visualizing is to read a picture book aloud, sharing only portions of the illustrations. Then ask students to create their own illustrations based on the text they heard. More advanced readers might listen to a selection from a novel that the class has been reading and create a picture or written description of a character or setting based on the information in the text.

Independent Reading

Students can also practice their visualization skills as a follow up to independent reading. Ask young students who keep track of their reading in reading logs or journals to respond to prompts regarding the images created by the text they have read: “Does the main character remind you of anyone you know?” “Have you ever been to or seen any place that is like the setting of your book?” Very young students can also draw images in their journals, recording their mental pictures in response to their reading. You can discuss these drawings during one-on-one reading conferences.

Older students who are reading novels can think about questions such as, “If you were going to make a movie based on your book, who would you want to play the main characters?” “What would the scenery look like?” and “Where would you want to do the filming?” These questions get at the imagery created in the mind of the readers and encourage those readers to share their mental pictures in their responses.

By Mimi Rothschild

Are you thinking about creating your own homeschool co-op or are you unfamiliar with what a cooperative is?  If so then please read this fantastic article I found while surfing the web this morning.  If you are in a co-op let me know how it’s going?  What are the benefits and what sort of unique things is your co-op doing this year? 

What Is It?

Cooperative Learning, sometimes called small-group learning, is an instructional strategy in which small groups of students work together on a common task. The task can be as simple as solving a multi-step math problem together, or as complex as developing a design for a new kind of school. In some cases, each group member is individually accountable for part of the task; in other cases, group members work together without formal role assignments.

According to David Johnson and Roger Johnson (1999), there are five basic elements that allow successful small-group learning:

• Positive interdependence: Students feel responsible for their own and the group’s effort.

• Face-to-face interaction: Students encourage and support one another; the environment encourages discussion and eye contact.

• Individual and group accountability: Each student is responsible for doing their part; the group is accountable for meeting its goal.

• Group behaviors: Group members gain direct instruction in the interpersonal, social, and collaborative skills needed to work with others occurs.

• Group processing: Group members analyze their own and the group’s ability to work together.

Cooperative learning changes students’ and teachers’ roles in classrooms. The ownership of teaching and learning is shared by groups of students, and is no longer the sole responsibility of the teacher. The authority of setting goals, assessing learning, and facilitating learning is shared by all. Students have more opportunities to actively participate in their learning, question and challenge each other, share and discuss their ideas, and internalize their learning. Along with improving academic learning, cooperative learning helps students engage in thoughtful discourse and examine different perspectives, and it has been proven to increase students’ self-esteem, motivation, and empathy.

Some challenges of using cooperative learning include releasing the control of learning, managing noise levels, resolving conflicts, and assessing student learning. Carefully structured activities can help students learn the skills to work together successfully, and structured discussion and reflection on group process can help avoid some problems.

Why Is It Important?

The authors of Classroom Instruction that Works cite research showing that organizing students in cooperative learning groups can lead to a gain as high as 28 percentiles in measured student achievement (Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock 2001).

Other researchers report that cooperation typically results in higher group and individual achievement, healthier relationships with peers, more metacognition, and greater psychological health and self-esteem (Johnson and Johnson 1989).

When implemented well, cooperative learning encourages achievement, student discussion, active learning, student confidence, and motivation. The skills students develop while collaborating with others are different from the skills students develop while working independently. As more businesses organize employees into teams and task forces, the skills necessary to be a “team player” (e.g., verbalizing and justifying ideas, handling conflicts, collaborating, building consensus, and disagreeing politely) are becoming more valuable and useful…