The Threads of Reading Blog » building reading excitement

Visual Story Telling for Creative Storytelling

Motivating Readers with Interest Charts

Using Guided Imagery To Build Strong Readers

Motivating Students to Read

The Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:06:54 +0000

Students love using cameras so why not capitalize on their natural interests by getting them to use visual images to create a story in 5 frames. This task has two important parts. The first is thinking about the story line visually, creating a title that tells about the story in a very direct way and then creating and arranging the photos to tell the story. The second part is sharing the photo story with a group. The group can comment on the poetic or prose forms of the images, critique the structure of the story, or make any other comments about the meaning or construction of the visual story. Here is an example of a visual story using Flickr about a young colt’s first day in the world to give you some ideas.

KTankersley — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:45:27 +0000

Get students interested in monitoring their own reactions to text by asking them to rate each chapter of a book they are reading on an “interest level” chart. After reading each chapter, students color in the bar to indicate how interested they were in the text of that chapter. Students can then discuss their reactions and what they liked or didn’t like about the various chapters of the book.

KTankersley — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:31:35 +0000

We know that good readers are able to picture characters, scenes and events that happen in the books they read. You can help children build their guided imagery skills by asking children to clarify their vision of what was happening in a book. After reading the story without showing children the pictures, ask children to pick one of the scenes from the book and to draw a picture of it as they saw it “on the movie screen” in their heads while you were reading. After children have shared and discussed their drawings with the class, reread the book and on the second reading, share the illustrations that are provided in the book. Lead students in a discussion about the fact that we all might visualize scenes from books in different ways and that this is using our imaginations as we read.

My Interest

Level

Wow – I hate to put it down! This was an exciting and interesting chapter.

Good – An Interesting chapter. I enjoyed it!

Ok – but not the best chapter I’ve ever read

So-So – Gave good info but didn’t interest me much.

Boring – I think this chapter should be left out of the book.

KTankersley — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:01:00 +0000

I just read about a great idea to get kids excited about reading that I wanted to share today. According to an article in the Washington Post, the Purcellevilla Library in Loudoun County, Virginia has implemented a new program called Paws to Read. In this program, students practice reading their favorite books to specially trained volunteer dogs. According to the article, student interest in reading as well as the growth that naturally comes from more reading has been the benefit. What a great idea and very easy to implement. Kids and dogs naturally bond together so what better partnership than this?