Venn Diagram

I’ve recently reignited my fascination with graphic organizers. I always loved them as a public school teacher, and now I’m using them with Sprite for homeschooling. She’s a highly visual learner who has just moved up to the fifth grade, so they work very well for her.

WHAT

Graphic organizers (GOs) are simply ways to arrange information so that relationships among ideas are represented visually. Words are used but along with lines, arrows, circles, or other images that indicate sequence, cause and effect, or other relationships.

Spider Map

WHO

• anyone who needs to SEE the ideas visually, especially visual spatial learners
• students trying to organize their thoughts for a writing project or a notebooking page
• best for middle and high school students

WHEN

• During prewriting — the thinking, organizing, and planning stage of writing
• After reading and during reading
• For narration
• As notebooking pages
• In portfolios

Graphic Organizer used for Math

WHY

They work!  Research shows that that use of graphic organizers (GOs) is effective for helping both middle school and secondary students to organize and remember academic concepts. For more research, visit Mentoring Minds.

HOW

To be effective, GOs should be coherent. Make sure that the information is displayed clearly without any irrelevant details. The parts should be clearly labeled with relationships or sequences indicated by numbers, arrows, lines, etc. in a way that is logical to the student.

Some students like to use color and sketches to show relationships on GOs.

I tend to print out a whole set of graphic organizers, using various colors of paper. Then I keep them in a file in our homeschool area. When a prewriting or notebooking task comes up, I offer the set to Sprite and let her choose which layout best fits her needs.

Network Tree

How to Get Started

Download this PDF assortment Utah Education Network of six basic GOs. Print them out and keep them handy this week for notebooking, narration, book reports, or prewriting activities.

Or if you want a few more to start with, try this file North Carolina State University with dozens of GOs.

Or start with this file which includes an example use for each GO.

Any of these free printable graphic organizers can add structure to a noteboooking assignment. Often, they are less intimidating than an empty sheet of paper. The framework is already there, and your child simply fills in the ideas. Later, as students become familiar with the use of graphic organizers, they won’t need the forms at all. They can draw them on blank paper or even create their own customized GOs.

WHERE

The Super Duper Link List of Free Printable Graphic Organizers

The divisions here are somewhat arbitrary. Generally GOs can be used for many, many purposes. But for the sake of organization, I divided these links by subject area.

General Graphic Organizers

Education Place Graphic Organizers

All the standbys (story map, timeline, five W’s, flow chart, etc.) and some new ones — tree chart, ladder, idea wheel, etc.

Freeology – Free Printable Graphic Organizers

Be sure to go through all eight pages! There are a lot! All in PDF format.

Worksheet Works Graphic Organizer Generator

Customize several aspects of 12 different GOs. This is super neat! This site is currently in Beta and is free. In the future, I suspect it will require a paid membership.

Graphic Organizers that Support Specific Thinking

A short list of graphic organizers in Claris Works  & in PDF.
This site is unique because it tells the thinking skills that each graphic organizer taps into.

Region 15 Graphic Organizers

Options for English or Spanish, PDF or DOC, and landscape or portrait orientation. Includes all the standard graphic organizers plus writing portfolio, timelines, similes, predictions, etc.

Education Oasis Graphic Organizers

General graphic organizers in PDF format.

Education World’s Teacher Tools & Templates

These files are unique in that most of them are .doc format — you can download and modify them.

Graphic Organizers.com from Masterminds Publishing

Divided by category such as cause and effect, comparisons, & hierarchies.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel Graphic Organizers

Divided by function — for presentations, for vocabulary, for summarizing, for sequencing, for main idea and supporting details, for making connections, for self-questioning, for inferences/predicting, for cause and effect, for compare and contrast, character maps, and writing. Most are PDF format. They appear to be scans of hard documents, so quality is mediocre.

Science

Science Class Graphic Organizers

Attractive, free graphic organizers divided by science categories.

Houghton Mifflin Science: Graphic Organizers

A LONG list of graphic organizers in PDF format that accompany Houghton Mifflin Science textbooks for grades 1-6. This list is very well organized so that the printables are easy to locate and use even without the textbook.

Hint — use Ctrl F to bring up the find function in your browser. Then enter your key words.

Language Arts

Graphic Organizers –Tools for Reading, Writing, & Thinking

Secondary level, language arts graphic organizers in PDF format. The ones for expository writing are especially nice.

Graphic Organizers for Reading Comprehension at Scholastic.com

Mostly related to reading fiction, but some general ones too.

Lesson Plan Printables –Writing

Lesson plans and printable graphic organizers related to writing.

Super Teacher Printable Graphic Organizers

Help your students organize their writing with Venn diagrams, story maps, and more. Your students can use the writing webs, chronological order charts to improve the organization of their writing.

Teacher Files Graphic Organizers

a variety of graphic organizers to help your students communicate their comprehension of text.

Busy Teacher’s Cafe Graphic Organizers

Another varied assortment of graphic organizers.

Math

SOUTHWEST GEORGIA RESA Math Graphic Organizers

A collection of math related GO’s in both DOC and PDF formats. Topics include area, ratios, quadrilaterals, cross sections, constructions, and much more. The site is a bit messy, but worth browsing around. Scroll do the bottom of the page for links to printables or use the pages dedicated to grades 4-8 and 9-12.

Fact Families Graphic Organizers

Attractive PDFs to record addition families for all addends from 4 to 12.

black and white graphic organizer images © CAST, 2007

Sprite with Solar Eclipse Lapbook

When we started using lapbooks in Kindergarten, I didn’t know if we’d continue using them throughout the years or if lapbooking would taper off. At one point I thought we’d transition solely to notebooking. But Sprite still enjoys making minibooks, so we haven’t given up lapbooks altogether. Sometimes we mix up lapbooking and notebooking, too.

Yesterday was a good example of another lapbooking transition. I asked Sprite how she would like to narrate her solar eclipse experience, and she chose making a lapbook.

To give her a bit of structure, I listed five questions she should address in some way:

1.  What is a solar eclipse?

2.  What are the stages in a solar eclipse?

3.  How should you watch an eclipse?

4.  What parts of China could see the eclipse?

5.  What did you experience today, July 22, 2009?

She used newspaper clippings, blank minibooks that I’d already prepared, and her own creativity to devise with this simple lapbook.

Cover of Solar Eclipse Lapbook

Inside of Solar Eclipse Lapbook

How to Watch an Eclipse

Related posts:

1. We Saw the Eclipse!
2. Magnets Lapbook
3. Light and Color Lapbook

Narration Corner Bookmark

Narration is a cornerstone of a Charlotte Mason homeschool. But looking at the results of the poll on my Narration Helps page, a lot of us simply forget to do it! I could use reminders as well, so I created some simple bookmarks to put in all the books we’re reading.

Some are standard rectangular styled bookmarks, and some are the corner pocket type (seen in photo).

To go directly to the file, click HERE.  The PDF is hosted at Homeschool Launch and is also linked on the Narration Helps page.

How does lapbooking fit into a Charlotte Mason homeschool?

When Miss Mason was alive, there was no such thing as “lapbooking.” Surely she was aware of the clever art of origami paper folding. But I doubt that her students used “hamburger” and “hotdog” folds to record their dictation each day.

Forces Lapbook

So does that automatically mean that lapbooking is off limits to a CM educator? A purist may say yes, the CM homeschool has no room for such modern, frivolous pursuits as folding paper into clever shapes and drawing silly pictures. That’s a waste of time that could be spent memorizing French conjugations or exploring the anthills in the backyard.But for most of us, more eclectic CM “adapters,” lapbooking can fit in well with a CM philosophy.

Basically, lapbooking is a form of narration.

It’s a written and/or visual form of narrating back what was learned that day, that lesson, or that week. That’s exactly how we use lapbooking.

Didn’t Miss Mason encourage the use of journals and timelines (a book of centuries)? Aren’t lapbooks similar to those in many ways — paper documentation, often in visual form, of what was studied?

How does a minibook come about? I certainly have in mind what I think should be in the minibook, but my aim is to draw that out of my daughter. So I’ll ask a question like,

• “What did we learn from that motion experiment?”
• “What were the most important ideas from these three pages about Hopi Indians?”
• “So, what should we put in a minibook about Pizarro?”

What she answers in response is her verbal narration. We usually hone it together before she puts it into the minibook, through some combination of writing and drawing.

Isn’t the verbal narration enough? Certainly it is. And sometimes we stop there. We don’t put everything we learn into a minibook. But my daughter is highly creative. She loves the artistic element of working with paper and markers. I am catering to her strengths through lapbooking and providing a record of her learning that she enjoys looking at again and again. I’ve discovered that she somehow needs to draw or move to express herself. She often grabs pencils as makeshift puppets to act out her narration or draws stick figures and maps on scrap paper to clarify it. I do require her to use words to express herself, but visual expression is also a valid form of demonstrating understanding. And for her, it seems to be her preferred style.

Could lapbooking simply be twaddle? Sure it could. In my opinion, many of the lapbooking kits that are for sale are basically glorified worksheets that require little thinking. Cut and paste, color a bit, and voila, you’ve made a lapbook. But if the creation of the minibook requires thought on the part of the student, then it is not meaningless.

If it’s a reflection of what the child has learned through living books and/or through direct observation, lapbooking has real value.

And then again, I do think that doing a rather empty lapbook kit is still superior to watching television or playing video games.
Here is an example of how we use CM and lapbooking  hand in hand.

We had been making minibooks during our four week study of motion and forces (a component within Noeo Physics 1). When it came time to assemble it all into the actual lapbook foundation, I told Sprite that she needed to create a cover image to represent what we learned about forces and motion (through our living books and experiments). When she was done, I had her explain how her drawing exemplified all we had learned. What follows is her narration.

Motion & Forces Lapbook Cover

The girl is running. That’s motion. And she’s pulling the kite. That’s a force.

The wind is pushing the kite; that’s also a force.

Gravity is pulling the girl and the dog down. She’s staying on earth and not floating or drifting away.

The kite is being pulled by the wind. Gravity is pulling it down, but it’s a (She lapses into Chinese here, searching for a good word.) ?? ?literally: competition?between these two forces.

The girl is running. Her shoes have friction with the ground. That’s good because without friction, she would not be able to stop.

She’s working by pulling the kite. Running is also work. Every motion is work – even your heartbeat is work. She uses her forces over a distance, and that means she’s doing work.

The dog is still. He is at rest.

The long kite is heavier, so the girl is using more force to hold it. The small kite is lighter, so it takes less force to hold it.

Actually, she touched on the main points of our entire study including the three laws of motion, gravity, work, and friction.  I have to think that Charlotte Mason would be pleased.

Related posts:

1. Charlotte Mason Carnival
2. Unit Studies and Charlotte Mason
3. Rocks the Charlotte Mason Way