EDF3306 Literacy Assessment 2:
Reading Comprehension
Summarising and visualising
Here are some ideas for activities which you could use with your students to help them develop summarising and visualising capabilities.
Introduction to visualising texts
Read students a text without showing them the pictures and ask them to close their eyes and visualise the story in their mind.
Some books which have highly descriptive passages which may lend themselves well to this include:
-
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
-
Flood or Fire by Jackie French
-
When the Sun Took the Colours Away by Irena Sibley
After reading, ask students to draw a picture of their visualisations. Discuss the students’ pictures and remind them that everyone visualises the same text in different ways. Read the text to them again showing the pictures, so the students can experience the author’s visualisations. You could also discuss with book to movie conversions the students have seen and if the movie matched their visualisation of the text.
Make an online character scrapbook
Invite students to use the scholastic online Character Scrapbook to make a character from a book they are reading. This tool allows students to create a scrapbook page about a character including making a cartoon face of the character and then filling out a fact file with things they know about the character.
Students could use this tool while they are reading a book to add and summarise information about characters as it arises. Multiple students could make a page about the same character and then compare them to notice the similarities and differences in their visualisation of the same character.
Please see the example scrapbook page we created about Harry Potter!
Make a comic strip about a book
As a way of summarising and visualising a book, students could create a comic strip showing the main events and characters of a novel or the main points presented in an information text. Students could do this by hand, or using a free online tool such as Make Beliefs Comix.
Students could make a new comic strip as they read each chapter of a book and then look back on their work to see how their understanding and visualisation of the book changed as they read.
Please see the example comic we designed for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!
