Graphic+Organizers


 * Strategies that help your students use their skills at "classification".**

Classification defined: Involves identifying, comparing, and ordering information or data to create meaning based on relationships of parts to each other and parts to the whole. To classify, student need to apply criteria for belonging or not belonging to a group or set.

The more sensory data they gather, the more they have to process. Encourage students to explain how objects, information, situations, words, and so on are alike and different from other things and how they are related in sets and subsets. Let their cognitive structures grow by equipping your students to learn, create, and change. **Father Serra and the California Missions: Let the Adventure Begin can be used in a variety of classifying lessons.**

Ask students: 1. What did they notice? Share after the live videoconference. 2. Give students collections of assorted materials and ask them to put things together that go together. (Items that have historical significance to the Mission Era.) Do not tell them how to classify the materials. It is this process of identifying, comparing, and organizing that develops classification structures. 3. Involve students in practical classification tasks in everyday life. Encourage them to classify and organize their personal possessions and then to explain their criteria for the groupings. (use everyday life of the neophytes, the mission fathers, chores, etc.) 4. Encourage students to use graphic organizers - such as diagrams, outlines, matrices, and illustrations - to identify the relationships of parts to each other and to the whole, and the relationships of sets and subsets to each other, Instead of giving preprinted forms, ask them to create their own format. 5. Model classification. Explain to students why you group items the way you do (mentally and physically). Encourage students to notice how order reduces their stress, speeds their thinking and other activities, develops their efficiency, and helps them control and predict outcomes in many situations. 6. Use time and space as criteria for organizing relationships. Encourage students to notice when and where things and events are in relationship to each other and to the clock and calendar. This helps them classify and access information.

FROM: This book focuses on why students struggle and what teachers can do to help them become self-directed learners. Garner, Betty K. //Getting to "got It!": Helping Struggling Students Learn How to Learn //. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2007. Print.


 * Helpful Graphic Organizers: **

Website for [|additional ideas] to use with your students.

Note-taking Device

Vocabulary Word Map

KWL Chart