We know students are struggling reading informational text… and the issue seems to be expanding! Literacy is so important to our students, both for success in your course and for success in life.  Using the same reading strategies unit after unit can be boring. Are you looking for a different way to engage students during reading? Try a visual summary.

Start off by finding pictures that represent the content that matches the reading. I love to use a combination of stock photos, political cartoons, and if you want, you can also use images from your Word Wall.

Begin a lesson by passing out the images and having your students analyze and annotate with bullet notes of what they see in each image.  This step is so important.  If you just pass out the images, and then ask the students to match, they may get overwhelmed with the different pictures.  Giving your students time to examine the images also helps build schema prior to their reading.

Next, pass out the reading. As students read, they will need to find the image that best describes each paragraph. Periodically stop the activity and check student responses.  You can also support reading comprehension by asking your students to highlight the sentence they think corresponds to the picture.  If you choose this route, also add numbers to your images and they can annotate the text with the number as well.

As they continue reading, your students will need to put the images in order. Once they have finished reading and putting all of the images in order, take away the reading and have them discuss a summary based solely on the images.  You can extend the activity by having  them write a summary or take notes. Let me know what you think of this reading strategy 🙂