The Power of Graphic Organizers!

Hi!  My name is Kay and I am currently teaching Kindergarten and Transitional Kindergarten in south Los Angeles.  I blog at Sommer Pride and am excited to be a part of this collaborative blog!

Would you like to ... have your students learn and understand content easier? ...reduce the semantic information processing demands on students?  ... have your students become more strategic learners?

You can do it all by using graphic organizers!

Powerful processes occcur when using graphic organizers.  Students will engage in information processing and higher order thinking skills.

Before students put information into graphic organizers, they need to recognize important information, make decisions about what is essential, consolidate information, and identify main ideas and supporting details.

Once the information is on the organizer, students are able to use the information to draw conclusions, make inferences, debate, and extend the understanding of important concepts.

Here are some of the different types of graphic organizers that we have created during the year.

Brainstorming about musical instruments

Categorizing types of transportation

Describing what we see in our neighborhood

Analogies - animals and babies

Story map - fiction

Main idea and supporting detail - realistic fiction

Parts of the whole - numbers

Parts of the whole - snowman

Keep in mind that the goal is to enable students to construct the graphic organizers by themselves, which includes the actual graphic as well as the content inside the graphic.

The possibilities are endless!  So use graphic organizers in your classroom and increase student success!