Tips and Tricks

August 24, 2026

Station activities are a great way to provide differentiated, hands-on learning experiences for students, and VNG visuals are perfect for these activities! Stations are successful when they don’t require a particular order for students to complete them in, and when they are accessible to all students, even students learning the content for the first time in this lesson.

The following are six ideas for different stations. Ideally, the class will be separated into six groups of 2-5 students, and each group will start at a different station, then rotate. Each station should take about 5 minutes, with the whole activity comprising approximately 30 minutes. To enhance accessibility of this activity, and to deepen discussions, we recommend starting with a warm-up and a structured conversation about the observational question, then sending students to their stations.

Station #1: Fill It In

Print out the version of the visual that has the text labels covered up as blanks. Create a word bank with the missing labels, or print out the missing labels in strips. Have the group work together to figure out which labels go in which blanks.

Station #2: Interactive Reading

Print out the visual and copies of a short, on-level reading passage related to the visual. Have 2-4 sentence stems related to the visual and reading topic and instruct students to choose a sentence stem, then read with the intention of finishing that sentence. Some generic ideas that might be relevant to the topic you choose:

• This reading was about…
• In this reading, the author assumes we know…
• One important event/characteristic/step I read is… because…
• This reading is related to what we’ve learned because…

Station #3: Vocabulary Connection Web

Print out the visual, and 8-10 other visuals related to this visual, and provide 10-12 lengths of string and some sticky notes. Have students create a web between the visual and the other visuals by connecting two visuals together with string, and then on a sticky note stuck to the string, a short description of how the visuals are related to each other. Some visuals might be connected to several others, and some might be connected to only one other visual.

Station #4: Create Your Own Visual

Have each student of the group draw a representation of the word. Encourage the students to either try to create a visual that explains the word (such as VNG visuals do), or to create a metaphorical representation. When they finish, have them display their visuals at the station, and have them vote on the visual they think best depicts the word by placing a sticky note next to the visual.

Station #5: Create a Whole-Class Argument

Pose a question with 2-4 possible answer choices but no one clear right answer and which can be debated – such as a yes/no, a pro/con, or a least/most question. Write out the options in columns on a piece of chart paper, and have students write reasons for one of the options on a sticky note. A good reason might be a piece of evidence that the student cites, or an argument in favor of one of the answer choices.

Station #6: List, Group, Label

Print out 8-15 VNG visuals related to the main visual of the lesson, and have students try to sort them into three or four categories based on something the visuals or concepts have in common. Then have them come up with category names for each category. Lastly, have them record their categories and compare them to other groups’ categories.

Have Students Pose a Question

Students often feel intimidated to ask questions because they feel that, unless a question is a deep, probing question, it is a “bad” or “dumb” question. In fact, clarifying questions can spark deeper thinking and should be encouraged. The Evidence-Claim-Reasoning activity in VNG lessons begins with students choosing a question based on one of the following sentence stems:

• One thing I don’t know is…
• One thing I wonder is…
• I did not understand when we talked about ______.

Though these are “sentence” stems, they express inquiry and are questions. The first and third stems are clarifying questions, and the second stem is a probing question. Have students choose a stem and share it with their partners or table groups using the QSSSA structure, then call on a few students to share whole-group. To extend the discussion, have them add “But I think…”

Note: this activity is great after students have been exposed to some new information, either by discussing the visual, or having read a passage or watched a video.

Evidence-Claim-Reasoning

Sometimes referred to as Claim-Evidence-Reasoning (CER), this strategy has students write an academic explanation to an interesting question in Science, Math, or Social Studies. This question can be one that students pose in the above activity, or one that the teacher poses.

1. Have students collect any evidence they think might be related to the question based on what they’ve learned or what they can see in the visual. They can work together as a group or in partners, sharing their evidence with one of the following stems:
2. I see that…
3. We learned that…
4. I read that…
5. Ask students to pose what they think is an answer to the question (the claim) and connect it to one or more of the pieces of evidence they collected (the reasoning), using either of the stems:
6. Based on _______, I believe… because…
7. ______ makes me think… because…

This step can be done individually, or by having students share their claim and reasoning with their groups, and as a group vote on (or combine) the most logical arguments.

Choosing a Reading Passage for the Lesson

The most effective reading passage is one that is aligned to the objectives of the lesson. In VNG lessons, this is a passage that is directly aligned to the anchor visual of the lesson, and that supports students’ ability to answer the inferential question at the end of the lesson. AI engines such as ChatGPT can be used to quickly create a reading passage that achieves these aims. They can also create additional passages at various reading levels to help differentiate the lesson for struggling or advanced readers. Here is an AI prompt template you can use to generate reading passages:

Create a reading passage for __th Grade students based on the attached visual and this writing prompt: _________ (inferential question). Also create another passage that is one reading level below, and one that is one reading level above.

You might notice that more and more VNG lessons include reading passages. These have been built with AI and edited by our team. You can find these passages in the Downloads section of each word’s page.

Note: it is always important to check the AI’s work for accuracy, length, and cultural sensitivity.

Talk, Read, Talk, Write

This strategy, from the titular book by Nancy Motley (2016), builds comprehension and critical thinking skills by structuring reading around academic conversations and writing. Here’s how to adapt it using The Visual Non-Glossary:

1. Talk #1. Show students the structured visual and have them warm up by discussing with a partner or group what they notice and wonder about in the visual. Then, have students answer the observational question in partners or groups using the QSSSA routine.
2. Read. Prepare students to read by giving them a list of 3–5 things to pay attention to (a “PAT list”) while reading by highlighting or annotating. Then have students read with the anticipation that they will discuss their reading afterwards.
3. Talk #2. Have students discuss the reading with one or more discussion questions in small groups. Importantly, this should be also done with the QSSSA routine. This discussion may include the relational question, if you feel it is appropriate at this point in the lesson.
4. Write. Have students discuss the inferential question, then have them write a response in complete sentences using the key vocabulary from the lesson.

For the VNG lessons that include reading passages, you’ll also notice that these lessons follow the Talk, Read, Talk, Write routine!

List, Group, Label

This strategy, from Teaching Social Studies to ELLs by Tina Beene (p.18), works wonders as a review at the end of a unit or across multiple units.

1. List: After the end of a unit, give students 8–20 VNG visuals from that unit. These should be visuals that students have already had conversations about throughout the school year, so they already have some familiarity with them.
2. Group: Have the students work in teams to make groups with the visuals, with each group containing at least 2 visuals.
3. Label. Instruct teams to come up with a label for each group. For example, a group containing the words March on Washington, Little Rock Crisis, and assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. might have the title “Important Civil Rights Events.”
4. Once completed, allow teams to compare their groups and labels with other teams.

Have Students Find New Visuals

This strategy is simple and promotes deep, critical thinking. Have students find a few images on the Internet, or draw a few images, to represent a visual. Once finished, have students share the images in partners or groups with sentence stems like:

• This image represents ___________ because…
• This image is an example of ___________.
• This image made me think about ____________ because…

Uncover the Picture

Have a complex visual? Want to quickly engage students at the beginning of the lesson? Try the Uncover the Picture strategy from Teaching Science to English Learners (p.16) by Stephen Fleenor and Tina Beene. Here’s how it works:

1. Cover up most of the visual with rectangles, and ask students to write or share verbally what they notice and/or wonder from what they can see.
2. Remove one or more rectangles and again ask students to share what they notice and/or wonder.
3. Remove all of the rectangles and ask students to share what surprises them and/or what they wonder.

This process builds suspense and makes students focus on key parts of the visual, which builds their ability to make inferences from complex visuals.

Not sure how to do this, technically? See these tutorial videos explaining how to do it in Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides.

Identifying Unfamiliar Words

The VNG visuals are designed to focus on a key word (such as enzyme inhibitor) but include other academic words aligned to the standards (competitive, substrate, enzyme, for example). When we ask students to identify unfamiliar words, we can create an anchor chart for the lesson that shows pictures or simple definitions of these words. One method of doing this is:

1. Ask students to share with their partner or group any words in this visual which they haven’t seen before or which they’re not sure about in this context.
2. Call on students to share whole-class the words they came up with.
3. Write down each word on chart paper or a whiteboard as students share them, then give a simple (one- to three-word) definition and/or draw a simple picture representing the word.
4. Tell students that these words are going to come up in the lesson again, and they should be sure to refer back to this anchor chart when they see these words.

Cueing Students to the Purple

The color-coding of the Visual Non-Glossary is very intentionally designed. Sometimes specific units of study are color-coded: the Union is blue in the Civil War visuals of the US History, or x1 and y1 values in the point-slope form are yellow and green, for example. But consistently across all visuals in the VNG, the key vocabulary word of the visual is purple.

If you see a symbol with a purple glow, or a purple arrow, it means that that icon represents the vocabulary word. The secondary consumers of a food web have a purple outline in the secondary consumer visual, for example. A great way to help students navigate VNG visuals is to have them first identify the purple icon and words in the visual, and then explore the context around that icon. Here is a short video modelling how to explore the visual for the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Note: other words in the VNG visuals are also purple. These words also have visuals aligned to the same grade level.

Teaching Students the Symbols of the VNG

Some symbols are used throughout the visuals of the VNG. For example, a battery is used to represent energy, and a newspaper is used to represent a major (news-worthy) event. Especially in the beginning of the year, teaching students what certain symbols mean can help build their inferencing skills and make them less likely to feel overwhelmed when they look at a detailed visual.

To easily teach students symbols, you can print off this anchor chart and point to the common symbols on the anchor chart every time each one appears in the visual. After a few days or weeks, students will learn to look at the anchor chart, or simply learn the symbols. And as a class, you can be on the lookout for other common symbols, and add them to the anchor chart as you encounter them.

Building Your Word Wall throughout The Unit

Word wall visuals are much simpler than structured visuals. Whereas structured visuals are more detailed and layered for rich conversations, word wall visuals are simply meant to remind a student of a previous lesson featuring that visual. Word wall visuals appear in the new slide decks starting on Slide 6, and when printed out on an 8.5x11” piece of paper, should be clear and visible across the classroom.

Instead of setting up a word wall for all of a unit’s words at the start of a unit, try adding to the word wall one day at a time. If we introduce the word wall visuals with the lesson’s objectives (see Slides 4 and 5 and Tips and Tricks Volume 8), we can move those visuals to the growing word wall at the end of the day, and refer back to them when those words come up in subsequent lessons.

Personalized Student Word Walls in Interactive Notebooks

Students can have a section of their interactive notebooks where they build their own word walls as the unit progresses. This can double as a student-made glossary if students write their own definitions next to the visuals, or write out their answers to one of the guiding questions using the provided sentence stems next to the visual.

To easily provide word wall visuals for students to tape or glue into their notebooks, create a PowerPoint or Google Slides file with up to six word-wall slides on it, then adjust the printer settings to print six slides per page. These will be small enough to fit easily into students’ notebooks, and save you a lot of paper!

Frame the Lesson Using Visuals

After the warm-up or bell-ringer exercise, prepare students for the lesson by having them preview visuals related to the day’s vocabulary, as well as have them preview the final question of the lesson. This question can be exit ticket or closure of the lesson. Often an easy way to find a good question is to take the final (inferential) question of the main vocabulary word of the lesson. For example, for the word “activation energy,” the final question “How does an enzyme affect the activation energy of a reaction” can serve as the closure, and activation energy, enzyme, and substrate can serve as the key vocabulary.

When the visuals for these vocabulary words and the final question are displayed, students can preview them by discussing with their partners or groups using any of the following sentence stems:

I think the question is asking…

I think the word _____ is related to the question because…

I think the word _____ means… because…

The picture makes me think of… because…

Guiding Student through a Visual

Structured visuals often have a lot of detail, and it can help students to guide them through key parts of it. An easy way to start is to point out the places on the visual in which the vocabulary word is labelled. If you see any brackets, arrows, or lines that are purple, or any images that have a purple glow around them, that indicates the vocabulary word. For example, in the visual for the GI Bill, there is context shown before and after the passage of the GI Bill, but the GI Bill itself is a scroll of parchment with a purple glow. Having students focus on this as they think about the question can reduce intimidation and give more refined, thoughtful responses.

Model Pronunciation

This sounds simple, but it makes a huge difference in building students' confidence. I recommend starting the lesson (perhaps after the warm-up) by asking students to pronounce the key vocabulary word of the lesson out loud as a class. You can read out the word slowly and ask them to repeat it, or break up the syllables for them (such as "Appom-, Appomatt-, Appomattox").

This strategy works because students feel safer trying to say the word with the rest of the class, and then they have confidence in their small-group discussions using the word.

Allow Students to Share What Their Partner Said

Also super simple, also super powerful. Before calling on a student after they have had small-group or partner conversations, let the students know that they are free to share their answer or their partner's. I like to phrase it by saying, "if I call on you, feel free to share what you said or what your partner said, as long as you use this word in a complete sentence."

This builds students' confidence because they have the support of their partner (whether it's a weak or strong response, it still belongs to their partner, which takes pressure off the student), and it also reminds students to use the sentence stem for support.

Roving Paragraph

Change the sentence stem provided with one of the questions to start with the word "one." For example:

• One place the sediments that eroded from the mountain ended up was...
• One reason alleles are important for adaptation to occur is...
• One way an acid is different from a base is...

Then have students write an answer to the question and "rove" around the room, sharing their sentences with each other. Each time students share, instruct them to add their classmate's sentence to theirs with a transition word, such as:

• Additionally, ...
• Next, ...
• Also, ...
• Finally, ...

Have students share with 3-5 students to turn their original sentence into a paragraph!

Cloze Visualizing

Write a paragraph describing the visual, using the key words from the visual or other key academic terms. Cover up those words in the paragraph as well as on the visual. First have students try to guess what words go in which blanks. Then, show them a word bank and have them revisit their guesses. Lastly, show them the correct answers and have them discuss with their partners whether their predictions were correct.

Students Can Take Notes from The Visuals

Instead of having students take notes from a lecture, try first giving students a visual and having a structured conversation based on one of the questions. After they have a conversation, you can:

• As a class, create a bullet-point list of important ideas from the visual for students to copy down, or
• Have students create a list of important points based on the conversations from their groups, or
• Have students write out their answer to the question in their notebooks

This way, the note-taking process is a process of reflection on a hands-on activity, rather than passively following along in the class.

Complete the Picture

As a warm-up, introduction to a concept, or even as a review, show students a visual with half of it covered up. Then ask them to draw the second half, or have a conversation in their small groups about what the second half might look like, or both. The visual could be displayed on the board, or by copying and pasting it into a PowerPoint file and covering one side with a rectangle, the visual could be printed out for each group.

Embrace the Non-Perfect Responses

Many students who respond to the conversation prompts in The Visual Non-Glossary might not have perfect or completely right answers, and that is a good thing! That is because when we call on several students and ask them to share not the right answer, per se, but their most thought-out answer, we create a culture of discussion, deep-thinking, and confidence. When part of a students' response is incorrect or incomplete, highlight the parts of that student's response which were correct, and then call on another student.

For example, if a student (let's call her Cynthia) says "A subscript tells you the number of elements in a chemical formula," instead of responding "No, the subscript is the number of atoms of each element," a teacher might respond: "Great, Cynthia noticed that the subscript is a specific number, and subscripts can be different for different elements. Eric, what did you say a subscript tells us?"

After calling on two or more students, if anything is missing from students' responses, we can always add in details, such as "Did anyone notice that the subscript lets you connect a chemical formula to the structure of a compound?"

Extend Lessons by Having Students Make Relational Connections

After students have discussed the three guiding questions for a certain visual, we can extend their learning by asking them to identify one other word from earlier in the year that this word is related to. Students can discuss the relationship using the sentence stem, _____ is related to _____ because...

For example, a student might say, "An artificial reef is related to diversity because it creates more diversity in an ecosystem" or, "An artificial reef is related to abiotic because it is an abiotic factor that species depend on."

Review/Preview by Having Students Guess The Word

As a warm-up/bell-ringer/do-now activity, display 3-4 visuals that have either previously been covered or will be featured in the lesson. Cover or crop out the words and questions and ask students to try to identify which words represent which visuals. This can be done with a word bank, without a word bank, or by giving students a word bank after they have guessed the words. It is important to remind students to provide some justification as to why they chose each word for each picture.

After students have brainstormed individually and the class has started, have students share in partners or small groups using a sentence stem such as "I think picture ___ represents ________ because..."

Specify Who Goes First

When having students discuss a visual in groups or breakout rooms, instructing very clearly who will speak first in the group can motivate groups to start talking and ensure equitable discussion within the group. This can be done using superlatives, such as "person with the longest hair" or "person whose name is closest to A in the alphabet."

This can also be done by setting up a lettering system. In an initial warm-up or group discussion, students can be instructed to each pick a letter (A, B, C, D, etc.). In subsequent discussions, groups can be instructed that a specific letter is going to speak first. This system can also be used to randomly call on students after a discussion (e.g., "Let me hear from Person C of each group").

Thinking Signal

Having students show a thinking signal is a powerful strategy for providing the right amount of wait time, as well as helping students focus on the question. Classic thinking signals include giving a thumbs up, lowering one's hand, or sitting down when ready. In virtual or hybrid lessons, students can be instructed to type a specific letter into the chat but to not send it until they are ready to answer the question. My favorite thinking signal, in any type of lesson: instruct students to point to the vocabulary word above the visual, or the sentence stem, and to not lower their fingers until they are ready to finish the sentence. This gives them think time while priming them to use the key vocabulary word in their responses!

Interaction without Breakout Rooms

In virtual and hybrid lessons, highly structured breakout room sessions are excellent for students to interact with the visual, processing the content and practicing the language. In addition to breakout rooms, here are some excellent options for online interaction:

• Have students post a video on Flipgrid using the sentence stem, then instruct them to respond to other students' videos using stems such as "I agree/disagree with ____ because..." or "My response was different from ____ because..."
• Assign partners or groups, then instruct each group to send messages to each other on a specific shared document, Google Jamboard page, or Padlet post.
• Have students submit their complete sentences to the chat or a shared document or discussion board, then call on one or two students to unmute and read out loud their favorite response, giving credit to that student.

Note: However the students interact, it is key to follow up interaction with whole-group sharing by randomly calling on one or more students. This signals to the students that their peer-to-peer conversations matter!

Focus on 2-4 Words in Each Lesson

While many vocabulary words will come up in each lesson, we can help students master vocabulary by specifically focusing on 2-4 words in each lesson. For the following activities, think of 2-4 visuals from The Visual Non-Glossary to have students interact with during the lesson.

Warm-Ups/Bell-Ringers/Do-Nows

During the first 2-5 minutes of class when students are entering and getting settled, display the visual for one of the words and have students write down everything they notice in the visuals. When the time is up and everyone is ready, ask the students the first question in the visual and have them share their answers with their partners or breakout groups.

Closures/Exit Tickets

During the last 3-7 minutes of class, have students write an answer to the last question in the visual of one of the day's words. For added elaboration, have students provide examples and encourage students to use all of the day's 2-4 vocabulary words in their responses.