Graphic Organizers

Graphic Organizers are those funny little drawings teachers used to put up on the board to show how ideas are related. I personally have not seen a teacher use a graphic organizer (other than Nicholson or Bond) in YEARS.

For me personally, I can make them, but I do not like using them. I was taught to use a graphic organizer as a way to brainstorm ideas for an essay, not to help understand a text. I think if graphic organizers are presented correctly they can be very beneficial to students of all reading levels.

Struggling readers would benefit greatly from an ongoing graphic organizer that develops as the characters develop. These students would be able to visually see the characteristics that they may be having trouble imagining in their mind. A graphic organizer would help a student who can not "hear" the text at lest to see the text in a purely visual form.

An activity that just popped into my head would be to have students read a descriptive passage of a character in the text we are reading and develop a graphic organizer based on this passage. Students would then take their graphic organizer and create a visual representation of the character based on the graphic organizer.

Struggling readers as well as good readers would be able to visually represent something they have already read. This visual representation may produce a deeper understanding of the character being depicted, thus helping the student to become a more advanced reader.