Graphic Organizers with Language Support

Reading Comprehension can be difficult for students, even those with great reading skills. When we ask students to explain their thinking or write about what they read, it’s almost like we’re asking them to converse in a foreign language.

Teaching Academic Language and Scaffolding Learning

Academic language does not come easily for most of our students.  There are a select few who grow up hearing it spoken by their parents at home, but for the most part (my own kids included), asking students to use specific language structures when speaking and writing about a text is just downright hard!  Think about our English learners who don’t come to school speaking English.  It’s even more challenging for them.

I’ve written a few blog posts in the past about the components of academic language and developing academic language using familiar content.  Those posts build some background knowledge about the why and how we as teachers can ratchet up the language used in our classrooms.  This post is about one specific tool that you can use.

Over the past couple of years, I have built a series of resources that you can use in your classroom to give students the language they need to be successful when speaking and writing about reading comprehension skills and strategies.  

As we have read stories and novels each week, I have found that giving my students the language they need to use and be successful makes a world of difference.

Using Academic Language in the Classroom

I linked to two different articles above that outline how I use academic language in the classroom.  Here is one more example of its use.  In these charts, my goal was only a speaking goal, and it was to help students take part in an academic conversation about a book.  I had read aloud a book to students and we were discussing whether or not the character had made the right decision.  Students used the sentence frames on the posts to support one another’s opinions.  Later in the week, we looked at countering another students’ opinion.

The beauty of these posters, the graphic organizers and the bookmarks is that they can be used all year long to support learning.

Reading Comprehension Graphic Organizers

In these Reading Comprehension Graphic Organizers, students are supported via sentence frames and vocabulary suggestions specific to the comprehension skill or strategy you are studying in your classroom. Students will learn to discuss and write about text using high-level academic language with scaffolding.

What’s Included in the Reading Graphic Organizers Resource

These Reading Comprehension Graphic Organizers with Language Support or Detachable Bookmark contain 40 different graphic organizers in two different formats for a total of 80 different options. The graphic organizers target specific reading comprehension skills and strategies and can be used with any book or piece of text.

The Reading Comprehension Graphic Organizers now contain a Digital Learning option. They now include a link to a Google Slides version of the full-page graphic organizers. The Digital Graphic Organizers are only available for the full-page graphic organizer.

List of Comprehension Skills & Strategies

Included are 24 reading skills:
Identify Main Idea & Details
Determine Author’s Purpose
Identify Cause & Effect
Classify & Categorize
Compare & Contrast
Draw Conclusions
Determine Fact & Opinion
Describe Figurative Language
Identify Genre
Describe Plot
Identify the Point of View
Make Predictions
Sequence Events
Describe Story Structure
Identify Explicit Information in Non-Fiction Text
Determine Theme
Summarize / Summarise

7 Reading Strategies:
Make Connections
Ask Questions
Make Inferences
Visualize / Visualise
Determine Important Information
Monitor Comprehension
Understand Text Structure

Some strategies and skills have more than one variation of the graphic organizer so you can choose what works best for your students.

These reading comprehension graphic organizers are easy to print and go and are perfect for small group or whole group instruction.  In the picture below you can see the two different formats.

The graphic organizers come in two formats:

(1) Graphic Organizer with Detachable Bookmark: This graphic organizer fills 3/4 of the page. The bookmark provides language support and can be cut off and used with other texts or books in the future.  The Bookmarks are the same bookmarks that come in my Reading Comprehension Bookmarks pack.

(2) Graphic Organizer with Language Support: This graphic organizer has the language support right on the page and often provides extra room for written reflection or explanation using the academic language.

How to Buy the Reading Comprehension Graphic Organizers

The Graphic Organizers can be purchased on my website or on the Teachers Pay Teachers web site.  If you’d like to purchase a bundle of all my Reading Comprehension Resources, that is also available at a 25% savings.