Visuals

Using VIsuals in the Classroom

One important learning objective in reader’s workshop for fifth graders is the ability to make connections to activate background knowledge before reading and during reading a text. There are three main types of connections students should be making in order to garner the highest level of thinking while reading. They should be making text to text, text to self and text to world connections. Last year students would regurgitate the types of connections they should be making but had a difficult time applying it to their own text. This year, I increased the amount of visuals while teaching this strategy in order to give students the optimal amount of support to apply it independently. In order for my visuals to support all learners, I try to have a combination of pictures, text and sentence starters. The goal is to have students identify the correct connection and apply it to a text.

The first set of visuals I used are the visuals on the promethean board alongside hand signals. The text to self visual on the promethean board shows a picture of a book with an arrow pointing to a child. I covered up the text surrounding it and had students turn and talk about their best guess about what a text to self connection might mean based on the words and the visual. My EL learners (and really generally all my learners) explained to me that they knew text to self connections meant that there is something in the book that reminds them of them because the picture was pointing from a book to a person. This informally showed me that the picture assisted them in understanding what this meant. The second visual I used was the text to text connection with a book pointing to another book. I repeated the same process and my students were able to easily make the connection that when the book was pointing to another book, there was something in common between two books. The third visual I used on the promethean board was the text to world visual. Using the same process, students were able to figure out that there was something in the book that related to the globe or world around them. The next step was aiding them in understanding what a connection actually is rather than having them just know the types of connections that can be made.

In order to understand what a connection is, we used hand signals. I showed them making a circle with my index finger and thumb with both hands and connecting them to understand what a connection is. I asked leading questions to help them use this visual to understand what a connection is. “What do you notice about my two hands are doing?” Students responded with “Both hands are coming together. Both hands are connecting together.” This led us to understand that a connection is when two things come together and there might be a relationship between the two (a word we have been working on in class). Doing a physical visual rather than just something on the board made it a little more hands on for students to understand.

Now that students were able to use visuals on the board and physical hand actions to understand what connections are and the different types of connections, I introduced a new visual to help students apply the strategy on their own. The third visual was the “Making Connections” anchor chart. This visual had a combination of images and sentence starters. Something that was really difficult for students last year was understanding how to start sentences to make connections. For example, if they knew that there was something related between their life and the text, they would often just say something like “I ride a bike” rather than “This is like my life because I also like to ride bikes in the summer”. The idea behind this visual was to give students a push on creating complete sentences with a little more complexity to their ideas. In this way, the image supported the sentence starters. As I modeled a read-aloud, I used this anchor chart to show students how to make effective connections. I paused during the reading and made my hand signal to show that I had a connection. I mentioned that there was something connected to the world from the book. I had a student come up and point to the anchor chart to show me where I could look. The student would point to the picture of the world and explain that there since I had a connection to the world around me, I had to use sentence starters from the globe section. Then I modeled using the sentence starter on the visual “This reminds me of when I watched…” to make my connection. This modeling helped students understand how to use and interact with the visual to make connections. Dan Meyers shows how visuals can aid a more inquiry based lesson in math (https://www.edutopia.org/visuals-math-curriculum) and the power of having students analyze pictures to deepen learning. This is the type of strategy I tried using in this reading lesson.

While independent reading, students were making connections in their “Connections Log”. There were three visuals on the top of their connections log to remind them of the connections they could make. They were encouraged to use that as well as the anchor chart posted in the room to make their connections. Looking at the connections log and exit slips, these visuals effectively supported students in making connections. The connection log shows that students were taking sentence starters from the anchor chart visual and applying them to their own connections. For example, the first piece of evidence shows a student using the sentence starter “This is like my own life because…” “This character reminds me of myself because…” “This reminds me of when I read a book…”. She was also successfully able to identify the correct connection she was making which shows me she used the anchor chart pictures to not only identify the connection but also use the sentence starters accompanied by the picture to apply her connection. The same is true for the other two students’ work.

The second piece of evidence that showed me the visuals aided students in making connections is the exit slip. Students were asked to make one connection with the class text we were reading (“Wonder”). Looking at the exit slips students were making a lot of text to text and text to self connections and specifically using sentence starters to aid them. They were also able to identify the correct type of connection (placing them in the correct box). The students’ work states “Auggie (a character in the book) is like Harry Potter in the book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets because they both get bullied a little.” She clearly used a sentence starter from the visual and the picture on the anchor chart to help her identify a text to text connection. My data tracker shows that 16/20 of my students were able to identify and apply connections.

The visuals supported my EL learners (about 80% of my class) through pictures and sentence stems. Understanding what connections actually are through hand gestures supported my more hands on learners. However, I’m not convinced that the visuals helped push my advanced learners (or all my learners). Next time, I would add examples to the visuals to increase the depth and complexity to the connections. So rather than just “This is like my life because I ride a bike in the summers too” providing an example like “This is like my life because I ride a bike in the summers and it reminds me of the rush I feel when I get exercise, just like how Auggie felt excited when he rode his bike”. I would support this example with a visual of a person plus a sign that showed emotion and action to show that they can combine the two to make a more powerful connection.

Visuals on Flipchart/Smartboard

Visual on anchor chart

Evidence--Connection Log