Hands On Graphic Organizers for Writing

I love to use Graphic Organizers with all the writing we do!  Recently, I have been trying to incorporate using graphic organizers with even my youngest Kinder ELL students to support their writing.  One great way I found to do this was doing more hands-on organizers with which the students can practice organizing the information on a larger scale together. We recently did a mini-unit on the different animal groups.  We created this graphic organizer after reading our Animal Groups Emergent Reader and watching this excellent BrainPop Jr. video about animal classification.
Last, students wrote their own animal facts about their chosen group using these  awesome writing sheets from www.firstgradewindows.blogspot.com .The students were able to gain a lot of content vocabulary and loved the hands-on approach!   Please add comments on how you use graphic organizers with young students. 



 

BrainPop Video

 

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One Fish, Two Fish and Differentiation

Wow, did we have a lot of fun with Dr. Seuss last week!   This year I have 4K and Kinder ELL students, so I have been changing a lot of my Kinder lessons to meet the needs and the abilities of the 4K students.  All week, we have been working hard  on rhyming words and reading a variety of Dr. Seuss books.  My students' favorite project this week was the One Fish, Two Fish hand project.  This was pretty messy, but super fun!  You can see below the variety of ways to do this project depending on your students' abilities.  For the students who can write, they picked two rhyming pairs and included those on their projects.  For the students who are not at the writing stage yet, we found rhyming pairs from pictures.  Using picture cards or typed word labels instead of asking a student to write about a topic  is a great way to differentiate if you have an ELL student who not quite at the writing stage in English.  Please feel free to comment with some strategies you use for differentiation for ELLs or Special Education students!