Interesting note here about the formatting of the reading materials Lindamood-Bell uses in its Visualizing and Verbalizing program. When I’ve read Paragraph by Paragraph stories up to tonight, they’ve looked like paragraphs online — no tab indents and line spaces in between. The Whole Page the Associate Director had me read out last night to test how I would do with reading a whole page at once looked like paragraphs you’d see in books — tab indents and no line spaces. Tonight we read Paragraph by Paragraph stories, but they were formatted like the Whole Page story I read last night. That’s because these grade level 9 stories we can read one paragraph at a time or the whole story all at once (their choice? my choice? not sure yet).
The other thing is that we can also read them similarly to the way I read Multiple Sentences a few weeks back. When the paragraphs are short, we can combine two of them as if they are one: I put down one coloured felt square onto my desk and read two short paragraphs, then the story is taken out of my sight, and I give a word summary based on the pictures I formed. Repeat for the next paragraph if it’s a longer one or next two paragraphs if short. I suppose this is a way of easing me into reading a Whole Page. Start with reading a paragraph or two using material formatted the same way as a Whole Page story, then when I go on to reading a Whole Page, my eyes and perception are used to seeing book-like formatting so that my brain can forget about processing the formatting and focus solely on the language (written text) and creating imagery.
