ABSTRACT
Many times our students with strong nonverbal or visual-spatial abilities have the ability to read another person’s emotions with seemingly small amounts of information. Posture, facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, volume, and pitch—even the way in which a person walks—are the nonverbal cues that make up the largest part of communication. Nonverbal communication is not separate from verbal communication; each relies on the other to produce understanding. Likewise, students strong nonverbally may also be strong verbally—may, in fact, be some of the strongest readers and writers in a classroom. Sometimes, however, the opposite holds true. In this chapter, as in several others in the Hands-on Literacy, Grades 4–6 series, we challenge students to connect the visual and verbal to produce deeper understanding.
Students will demonstrate understanding of nuances of language and compare and contrast two or more voices in poetry. Using any poem (though poems with strong characterizations, voice, or a narrative style work best), our classroom of students will build a Nonverbal Interpretation Dictionary as they create pictures to match inferences about words and explain their choices both verbally and nonverbally. Cross hemisphere brain connections abound here—helping our critical thinking take root and our understanding grow.
