Graphic Organizers

"Graphic organizers" is a popular buzz phrase in education.  It is a new name given to many old and familiar tools.  Graphic organizers are pictures, graphs, tables or other visual representations of concepts, schedules, plans or other abstractions.  Because I have been teaching children who have autism, graphic organizers have been a part of my world for a long time.  

Children who have autism are greatly helped by seeing what is being discussed. If the picture provided has fewer words, all the better.  In an effort to stimulate the children to write more we have been using a graphic organizer, or a table, to generate phrases composed of an adjective and a noun.  For some reason the children are very enthusiastic about naming adjectives and nouns.

The children have not yet mastered the concepts of nouns and adjectives but they are making progress.

Graphic organizers have always been used in our classroom in the form of TEAACH schedule boards. In addition graphic organizers are used to show math concepts. Addition of fractions, in problems having common denominators, also use graphic organizers. The following graphic organizer is part of a PowerPoint Show in which blue fractional pieces are animated. The blue rectangular pieces move to the spots above the numbers on the number line as they are counted or added.



Collaboration with other specialists can be streamlined through the use of graphic organizers. Recently the topics for discssion at a student's IEP meeting were summarized in a table format (another graphic organizer). This helped the team to see at a glance what needed to be accomplished. In our classroom a graphic organizer in the form of a diagram of our classroom was used to assign aides to students during written academic work. There are many uses for graphic organizers in special education.