Visualizing with a Thanksgiving Themed Mentor Text

It’s November! November makes me happy because I start to feel really settled in the school year and love seeing how much progress my little friends have made since the beginning of the year.  I also love November because of Thanksgiving…I’m linking up with the awesome girls over at Collaboration Cuties for their November Language Arts Mentor Text linky with a Thanksgiving book.

I’m using the book: Thanksgiving is for Giving Thanks by Margaret Sutherland & Sonja Lamut.

I’ve said this before, but visualizing is one of my favorite strategies to teach throughout the year- I love the little images my friends draw. For this lesson, I just kept the book hidden in my file folder and I read through the story while my little friends made mental images of their own to match the story. I stopped throughout my reading to give them time to draw their mental images on their Visualizing paper.

I love seeing what my different friends draw on their papers when they don’t have any pictures to copy directly from the story.  I find that they usually chose things that they are also thankful for to include in their pictures (the ideas from the story they connected to best). After reading the story, my little friends finished their Visualization Station with their Visualization Explanation where they wrote what they drew in their pictures. These were my kinder-friends so they just wrote labels more or less of their pictures and explained to me why they chose to draw those pictures. We then also went over other things they are also thankful for in their lives.  Such a nice, heart-warming lesson and time of year!

To continue the thankful theme…thanks Amanda and Stacia for your awesome weekly linky- I’m ready to go find some other great books!