Visualization...the one tool I thought everyone had growing up. In high school I used to tell people who were disturbing my reading that they were "interrupting the movie." Little did I realize then how true this is. I didn't understand then that not all people had movies in their heads. My best friend and I used to compare the scenery, the characters and what they looked like to each of us, and debate their motivations.
When I was about seven or eight my mother bought my brother the Illustrated Classics to read. It had a plethora of classics with pictures in them. The last of the Mohican's, The Count of Monte Cristo, Edgar Allan Poe classics, etc. I read each and every one, savoring the pictures as I read. My brother never touched them, he would listen to me read but really the pictures didn't do much for him. He just was not interested. Since he drew all of the time in school I'm sure that if the teachers would have asked him to draw the action in the book being read he would have surely done well at that.
I personally LOVE art so this chapter was mixing my two true passions: reading and drawing or looking at art. Any incorporation of the things we love makes what we don't care about somehow relevant.
Obviously we can all see how much I am visually stimualted!
4 comments:
Danielle,
I agree with you that we all have movies in our heads. While reading I do the same thing, imagining each and every detail of the scenery. Maybe that's why some of us are dissappointed when we see the movies of books we have already read. The scenery and the characters aren't what we had imagined, so how could the movie be better than what we had imagined.
Yeah, that is why I felt so bad for the boy Kevin (in class reading last class) who said that b/c those details of the story don't match in his head with the director means that he is not as smart and can't translate text. That is the option that students was left to assume. Kinda' makes you mad. You want to help him add validity to his vision.
I wish that I could say that everyone plays movies in their heads when they read, but unfortunately, I don't believe it. I have met many kids who read just to get the words right. They have no idea what they are actually reading. I think the "movie" is something that we need to be teaching kids at a young age. Hopefully, this will get more kids to love reading and stop seeing it as a chore.
It's not that I think that this "movie" is something we innately have, we have to practice to achieve it. I don't remember gaining the pictures, they just appeared and they change with the book descriptions immediately.
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