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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Non-Fiction Writing Craftivity

I am always looking for new ways to make non-fiction writing more fun and hands-on.  I do mainly non-fiction writing with my ELL students so they learn new content vocabulary and practice writing skills.  We had already completed our unit of writing with transition words, so I always follow transition words with some sort of cycle writing, life cycles, water cycle, rock cycle, etc... .   I wanted to make this more of a "project" for students, since we have been doing so much writing lately, so here is an easy craftivity I came up with, all you  need is a few pieces of construction paper, markers, and if you want, some typed up labels.  This could really work for any "cycle" type writing.  On the outside students drew their diagram and under each step, they described it in their own words.  I was so happy to see them using their new vocabulary words in context!  Please feel free to comment how you make non-fiction writing more interesting and hands-on!