"Seeing" the Story with Notability

To follow up on our last post, Bring Your Own Device Advice, I wanted to share how I use one of my favorite iPad apps, Notability, to help students with reading comprehension. Many tutors, teachers and SLPs use the Visualizing & Verbalizing (VV) method by Lindamood-Bell to ensure that students are visualizing language. This is such an important component of comprehension.

With my iPad handy, the student and I read the first sentence or two from a paragraph. We discuss what the student is imagining, focusing on character and setting. One of the great features of Notability is the drawing feature. If the student is comfortable drawing, he can select all the colors he envisions, draw the main character or setting on the first page of Notability, and put in a significant amount of detail. when we were limited to using pencil and paper, the student (or I) had to re-draw the character in every scene, which was time consuming. It often resulted in the use of stick figures which isn't quite the same.

With Notability, the drawing of the detailed character can be copied, shrunken, rotated, and pasted into new pages so that, as new sentences (and scene/scenarios) are added, the character can be pasted into each scene. Here is an example of a VV story about a ferret getting into a dresser, opening a pantry door, eating his food and going into the clothes hamper. I find taking the time to draw the main character takes a bit of time up front, but pays dividends when the student can see the details throughout the drawn story. This helps when students are required to remember and re-tell stories. I hope you find Notability helpful!