Non-Fiction:
My favorite graphic organizer to have student’s use when reading Non-Fiction is a KWL chart. I’m sure we are all familiar with KWL charts, but here is a brief description of what they are. The K stands for Know…meaning what the students already know about a particular subject or idea, the W is for Want to know…meaning what would the students want to know about the subject or idea, and the L stands for Learned…meaning what the students learned after reading about and exploring the topic. KWL charts are a great way to introduce a new idea or topic as it helps students activate prior knowledge, gives them a reason to focus on what they are reading, and shows what they have learned when they are finished reading!!! Here is why I love using them for Fiction. Again, and I apologize for repeating myself, while I have a teaching degree and license, I have not taught in my own classroom yet. However, during my student teaching, I had the opportunity to teach a 5-week unit on Non-Fiction. With the students, we read a variety of Non-Fiction pieces, and explored their purpose, how they were written, what elements each type had and so on. I used the KWL chart before each Non-Fiction piece we read as was recommended by my cooperating teacher, and it was amazing how greatly it increased understanding for the students!!
Again, because of the work I did with the 4th graders I student taught, I found a graphic organizer that I thought was very useful for Fiction. In many of the Fiction books I read with the students, to the students, or that I learned about from the students, there were characters that were very important to the concept of the entire book, and therefore, I relied a lot on Character Maps. Character Maps can truly be beneficial with Non-Fiction, Fiction and Poems, however, I especially like to use them with Fiction because many fictitious main characters can be so complex and deep. Exploring who they are and why their specific features are important can be just as interesting as the book they are in and very beneficial to understanding the concepts and ideas in the book. Using the Character Map helps students to describe in great detail who the main character or characters are, thus helping them greater understand the story/book/novel they are reading.
Poetry:
I have never taught poetry nor do I know anything about teaching it. When there comes the time when I do have to teach it, I will be looking back at what I learn from all of your suggestions! So for this one, I simply looked online to see what I could find. Truthfully, I did not find a lot. The one I ended up choosing to share with you is one that I personally know would be beneficial to me when reading poetry. I am not big on poetry, and therefore I know that I would need a lot of help trying to find the meaning of a poem, and this particular graphic organizer does just that as it has the reader examining ALL aspects of a poem. Here is the link to the graphic organizer. Let me know what you think!!
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