Reading is Thinking: Visual Doodles

Recently, we started reading Nikolas & Co, a YA fantasy adventure novel by Kevin McGill (who will be one of our guest speakers. He is a writing friend of mine via Twitter who lives in Dallas, Texas. He spoke last year at my J/I Boy's Literacy Event).

As I read the story aloud, students are creating Visual Doodles to represent the images they see in their mind's eye ('Reading is Thinking'). They will also be writing about the story as well (focusing on summaries, opinions, connections and story features like character/setting/plot, figurative language, etc). Here are a few of the first doodles. These doodles document the events in the first chapter. They are in pencil and a bit hard to see but check them out! You should be able to make out: mountains, digging for the artifact, crazy project leader, a hover truck, gold dust shimmering in the air, etc.

I will be sending this blog link to Kevin. Hey, Kevin, what do you think? Leave a comment below!