Visualization assists many students in making sense of what they read. By thinking about shapes, colors, and spatial relationships, students can gain mental images of what they are reading about. This visualization allows mental images to be formed that aid directly in improving reading comprehension.

Encourage students to visualize what they are reading by:

• Consider what a character from a story looks like.
• Picture the setting from a fictional story in your mind.
• What additional words or phrases could you add to the author’s description to make the character or setting clearer?
• Allow your mind to become the director of a movie. The movie is about a fiction story that you just read. What is happening in the movie? Where are you?
• Consider the characters’ actions. What nouns, verbs, and adjectives can you use to describe those actions?
• Create pictures, diagrams, and other images to depict what is happening in a text.
• Use a graphic organizer to organize information related to characters, plot, setting, etc.