Visualization, part of non-verbal working memory, is an important, often overlooked skill that we can easily target within our therapy sessions.
Working memory, or the ability to temporarily hold, process, and manipulate information, is critical for learning. I will chat more about other skills (like complex sentence comprehension) that rely on working memory in the future, but today I wanted to focus on the skill of visualization specifically.
Much of the time, I work on describing using activities like this:

I show the picture and while my students are looking at it, we use as much language as we can to describe the picture or item.
To introduce the skill of visualization, we take this activity a step further and remove the picture while we describe it. This way, our students are challenged to recall what they saw using their visualization skills and their memory.
So instead of having my students reference the picture while describing, we work together to make a picture in their head that they can reference to answer the questions.
In the video above, you can see examples of one way you can structure this activity for two different levels. In level 2, I use visually ‘busier’ pictures and ask more advanced WH questions to increase the difficulty even more!
Being able to hold an image or words in your brain is critical for reading comprehension, problem-solving, effective communication with friends, and much, much more.
Click here to learn more about this resource! It makes teaching the skill of visualization (using language skills like describing, vocabulary, and WH questions) easy for you and scaffolded for success for your students!
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