[patschmidt]

Does anyone have any fun,active lessons to review this.... my kids seem to be having a hard time with this concept... so any help I can get would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Pat

[Bobbie]

I simply tell my class that the cause is what happened first and the effect is anything that happened afterwards. I have talked about this several times this year and when I pretested my class for the next unit they all had 100% on that part of the test.
I have used stories from my own life, picture books, and short paragraphs from stories. Don't forget to include some non-fiction paragraphs too!

[JRob]

We recently covered this skill by sharing the "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" books. I shared one or two with my class and we created a cause/effect chain. After, I gave a blank chain to my students and had them mimic the book by creating their own cause and effect stories. They turned out really cute. Some examples were: If You Give a Monkey a Banana, If You Bring a Blowfish to the Movies, If you Give a Dog a Donut...

After the chidlren created a rough draft of their stories, they did a final copy with illustrations.

[Teach4]

How about writing several causes on index cards and an obvious effect they would have on the other half of the cards and see if the kids can match them up. Or to show how the effect can become a new cause. Sit everyone in a circle. Give a cause to the group and choose a person to start. The chosen person has to come up with an effect, which is then the new cause for another effect. For instance, It was raining, so I had to come inside, so I had to take off my shoes, so I noticed that my socks were wet, so I put the socks in the dryer, etc.

[amyrado]

After we had discussed it a lot with examples from real life, each kids made a cause & effect window. Just using construction paper - the front shows the cause and has a frame around it.. you open the 'window' and the effect is on the inside. they had to write the cause & effect at the bottom and color a picture in the main area to show it. I hope that makes sense. It's hard to describe without showing..