Graphic Organizers at Their Best

Carol Brewer
Oct 26, 2009

Do you ever wonder which is the BEST graphic organizer to use with your students? Don't worry, it is a popular question for many teachers. The ultimate of course is when students design the graphic organizer that best fits their needs, but until that happens, we need to supply students with the best tools for note taking.

When choosing the best graphic organizers, consider the use of Text Structures. These Text Structures are how the authors organize or structure the text they write. For example, the author writes to compare and contrast different weather patterns, so the graphic organizer choice would be a compare and contrast matrix. When an author writes the steps in a process, the graphic organizer choice would be a sequence organizer.

The Text Structures are:

  • Descriptive
  • Sequence
  • Compare and contrast
  • Cause and effect
  • Problem solution
  •  

The suggested graphic organizers are:

Descriptive Graphic Organizer


Sequence Graphic Organizer


Compare and Contrast matrix


Cause and Effect Graphic Organizer


Problem and Solution Graphic Organizer


More information about the Text Structures can be found in the Reading and Writing Assignments books and flipcharts in the Learning-Focused Literacy Collection.