Chapter 5

Reading is seeing

In the fifth chapter of You Gotta BE the Book, Wilhelm focuses on using visual aids to help encourage and engage his students while reading. Throughout the chapter Wilhelm stresses the importance of using visualization to help experience the book as a whole and to see the book coming alive inside of their heads.

It was stated that, “It has been demonstrated that visual imaging encourages students to access and apply their prior knowledge as they read, increases comprehension, and improves the ability to predict, infer, and remember what has been read”, after reading this it is clear that to help students comprehend and understand the readings visualization needs to be integrated into learning.

Also in this chapter Wilhelm urges the use of art education to help the visualization of reading. I think that Wilhelm’s idea to let the students read comic books and graphic novels is a great way to make students who are not interested in the novels still engaged with reading. He had a couple great examples such as illustrating books, picture mapping, and making collages, to help intertwine both visualization and art into reading. As a future teacher I think that these techniques and projects that students can easily do is a great way to help show students are understanding and comprehending the reading. I found this Prezi presentation on how visual aids help readers comprehend what they are reading and thought it was very informational about students with learning disabilities.

I think that using visual aids in the classroom has a huge impact on students and also helps urge students to read more. There are a lot of useful activities out there to help represent visualization which I think is helpful to teacher and lets them try new ways of getting students to understand readings better.