[MeganS1282]

Does anyone have any good cause and effect lessons?

[teach4ever]

I don't have a specific lesson to share, but the Scholastic book Navigating Nonfiction is a wonderful resource for teaching all text structures and text features. Our reading specialist gave me a copy, but I am sure you can buy it online. I don't have the book at home or I'd share the Cause and Effect lesson in the book.
Good luck!

[no_1mickeyfan]

I just got this idea from LoveNoodle under another posting and saved it because I thought it was fabulous:

For cause and effect, I use the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie books by Laura Numeroff. We use graphic organizers and see how each event in the story causes another event. After having fun reading a bunch of these, we plan our own cause and effect stories. We make a story wheel. The stories are things like, "If You Give a Lamb a Hat," or "If You Give an Ant an Atom Bomb." They can be as crazy and as creative as the kids want, but they must come back to the beginning--just like the Numeroff books. The kids then make them into little books, using best cursive and illustrating.

[loriellen]

For a "story wheel", do you actually have a wheel template, or are you just calling it that? Sorry for my ignorance!

[grade4curlyQ]

To my knowledge, there are three types of cause & effect organization methods.

Stated: key words are in the text (because, if....then, as a result..... and so on)
Unstated: no key word is given in the text (Babe Ruth broke his arm sliding into 2nd base.)
Sequential: one cause leads to an effect, which leads to another cause and so on.

Teaching cause & effect in context using the ss text or even science text is a very effective method. By explicitly modeling up to 6 sentences that you the teacher discover as your read w/ the class (anchor charts), they will gradually assume the responsibility themselves. To begin with, they locate the sentences that are stated with the key words most easily. However, it may only be a week before they discover some unstated cause & effect sentences.

You can create a rubric based on your state standards (seems like we all have at least one state standard that refers to cause & effect, however your verbs in the standard will guide your wording/goals in the rubric. Our state standard states that the students will identify common organizational structures such as cause & effect......)

Perhaps have them read a paragraph w/ a partner and their task is to identify a cause & effect sentence. They ask themselves "What happened?" this will be the effect, then ask "Why did that happen?" this will be the cause. We color coded the effect red, the cause green, and if it was stated, the key words in orange. This allowed us to determine the most common organizational structure due to the pattern that developed. Color coding is awesome! Our brains just love things in color! We then told if the sentence was stated, unstated, or sequential. Lastly, we wrote the pattern "effect, key word, cause". (If it was unstated, we drew an arrow from the cause to the effect.)

As a result of a great deal of practice, they are constantly raising their hands to point out cause & effect relationships in SS.

"What happened?" they are constantly raising their hands to point out cause & effect relationships in SS.

"Why did it happen?" a great deal of practice

Key word "as a result" - therefore it's stated

Key Word, Cause, Effect

Good Luck!

[macaroney3]

Each child had to draw a line down the middle of the paper. They then labeled one side Cause and one side Effect. They wrote their own sentence and drew a picture for each side of the paper to show a causal relationship.

[gordongirl]

I also used the Numeroff books. I used If You Give a Pig a Pancake...I also put a picture of a little boy crying on the overhead and told them that this was the effect, then had them give me some causes. I know I got both those ideas from the wonderful teachers on this board! Thanks!! And, today the teacher across the hall from me put a pot on her head and asked the kids to give her possible causes for the effect of her having a pot on her head...it was cute!