Graphic Organizers

I looked into three different graphic organizers for 5th grade students.  The first one is a story map for non-fiction text.  The students are required to fill in the characters, setting, problem, and soultion for the map.  Then I added a piece to my organizer.  This week we are studying the story "Don Quixote", and the conept we are working on is understanding characters.  I added a thoughts, action, words section to the graphic organizer so they can use all of this to decide understand the main character more.  I can see ELL students struggling with character traits, so this would be something that we would have to work through together.

The non-fiction graphic organizer I chose is a venn diagram.  We were studying a story about cougars.  I used that to compare-contrast cougars and lions, another leveled reader from my curriculm.  I noticed many students struggle with similarities so we work through this concept together.  I have used venn diagarms often and they work very well.  These have worked at all levels also,

For poetry, I chose a vocabulary organizer.  5th graders struggle with poetry, and a lot of this has to do with the hefty vocabulary and figurative language.  This graphic organizer allows them to come up with synonyms and antonyns for the difficult word.  They can also use the word in a sentence to relate it more to their life.  Poetry would be a very difficult concept for ELL students.  They have to have a vast background knowledge of the english language.  Many english speakers struggle with these concepts also.