Reading Comprehension With Visualizing and Verbalizing

I have spent a lot of time working on teaching kids how to decode words and parse out how to say a word. But sometimes just being able to decode a word isn't enough. Some children need to be taught explicitly how to understand what they read, not just how to read it.

My Ana is one of those, mostly I think just because of her hearing disability and lack of language exposure early on. Many kids on the autism spectrum also require this sort of specific instruction in comprehension.

Anyone who does much research into the world of dyslexia and educational remediation of all sorts probably has come across the Lindamood Bell Centers. They are wonderful, effective, intense...

and extraordinarily expensive!

I called once before getting trained in Orton-Gillingham to see if they could help us with Ana. They quoted something like $20,000 for their 12-ish weeks (240 hours) of intensive tutoring over the summer. I think I about died when I heard that. Needless to say that was not an option for us, nor is it for most anyone else I know honestly!

Fortunately I was able to be trained in OG myself and that, plus Susan Barton's system has more than helped us to tackle the decoding aspect of reading. But I was still left with a child who struggled to comprehend things she read or heard. In fact, even describing a picture or a past event is difficult enough to induce tears!

Luckily, Lindamood Bell also has a system for comprehension called Visualizing and Verbalizing, and Gander Publishing sells a reasonably priced manual for it. Really all you need is the manual and some pictures to go with it, plus a few index cards and cardboard or felt colored squares.

I've been slowly reading through the Visualizing and Verbalizing manual these past few months and have begun the picture-to-picture stage with Ana. In this stage she describes a simple, colored picture to me and we work on going through each of 12 structure words to guide her description. Then I repeat her description back to her in my own words, describing the picture she made in my head through her description of the real picture that I cannot see.

The structure words are a fairly simple concept but I did find it useful to make up some extra notes on them. Especially because Ana not only needs to learn comprehension, she really needs to be taught enough vocabulary words to adequately describe an image.

I turned those notes into a printable for her benefit and I'm planning to laminate these and pin them around the schoolroom as study guides for her as she describes pictures or words. My notes go beyond what the manual describes, drawing connections to the part-of-speech each structure word points to, having a question for the student to ask themselves as they look at a picture or read, and listing whether it is a gross (large/main) or fine (small/less necessary) structure word. At the bottom are graphs or graphic organizers listing out many examples of words the student might use in describing a picture/word/sentence with that particular structure word.

This is an example of my basic notes for the first structure word:

You can find the entire printable in my store on Teachers Pay Teachers. 

Has anyone else used V/V at home? Did you find it fairly easy to DIY? Have you found any other great reading comprehension resources?