Wednesday Workshop: Graphic Organizers

I went back to work Monday and oh was it painful!  A friend of mine loaned me her "blue Cadillac", she fell last year on hand sanitizer in her classroom and slipped a disk, so the Cadi is back to strolling the halls of our school. I must say that I {HEART} my co-teacher, Caitlin! She had everything in order, de-cluttered, and ready to go Monday morning! Don't know what I would do with out her.


{NOTE: I went back to the doctors today for an X-ray and I am still unable to move.  She was VERY surprised to see me back and with no improvement.  I have been referred to Physical Therapy and taking the rest of the week off.}

I am linking up with Ideas by Jivey's Wednesday Workshop today :). I love graphic organizers and have used them since I started teaching! We use Thinking Maps at my school and telling my kids to create a circle map, tree map, or flow map is second nature.  In Reading I have my students use graphic organizers to keep up with, characters, theme, details, etc.  This week we were focusing on character development, RL.4.3.  Here are a few things we did...

1. Forgot to take a picture of the kids work :(  {So here is a sample}

I had the students fold their papers into four boxes, then label each box feelings, actions, thoughts, and sayings.  We focused on one character and found examples of each of these.  Students then used their boxes to create a list of character traits for our character.  There are a lot of cute graphic orgainzers out there with the same idea, but sometimes I have the kids create their own for the purpose of knowing how to create a graphic organizer when needed, to save paper, and so save copies.

2. I created this chart when we were reading Runaway Ralph earlier in the year, my students seem to do very well with it.  It can be used for any book, reading passage, poem, etc.  FREEBIE

3. When we complete our current book I am going to have students complete the following graphic organizer to help make connections to the text and characters.  Our Instructional Coach shared this with us one day and I felt it was meaningful to my kids learning. {Source: Book Club: A Literature Based Curriculum, 2nd Edition}


Here are some other Graphic Organizers in my TpT store.

Summarizing Sheet

{Best Seller}

Biography Graphic Organizer

FREEBIE