literacy44

everyday strategies to enhance literacy in the classroom

  • Home
  • Reading Strategies
    • Reading Activities
  • Writing Skills
    • Writing Activities
  • Lessons
    • Reading-Writing Connection Lessons
    • French Lessons
  • Graphic Organizers
    • Les organisateurs graphiques
  • NVSD44 Resources
    • Book List
  • Acknowledgements

Concept Maps

This activity encourages students to draw on inspiration for writing from a variety of sources and to use a variety of organizational techniques to express their ideas.

Strategies/Skills Used

Writing Skill 1: I generate ideas in a variety of ways.
Writing Skill 2: I organize my ideas based on my purpose for writing.

teaching-the-activity-1(1) Brainstorm (individually or in a group) the key ideas of a topic that interests the students.

(2) Model sorting and classifying the ideas and looking for relationships between them. Ideas might be placed on index cards, then physically sorted.

(3) Transfer the ideas to chart paper or project them on the wall.

(4) Draw connecting lines between the concepts, inviting students to make suggestions.

(5) Place words on the connecting lines that explain the relationship between the two concepts (e.g. “is,” “part of,” “leads to,” “is like,” etc.)

(6) Encourage students to revise their Concept Maps until they are satisfied with the categories, relationships and word choices.

(7) Model the process of taking one category and writing it as a paragraph.

Header-Reading-Writing-Connect-Activities-2Primary
  • Who Is the Forest For?
Intermediate
  • Baseball Saved Us
  • Out of My Mind
Secondary
  • [No activities yet]
  • Amazing Alternatives
  • Characterization … Writing in a Role
  • Circular Stories
  • Collaborative Character Sketch
  • Concept Maps
  • Evoking Emotion
  • Files and Folders
  • Finding Fabulous Quotes
  • Flipping the Familiar
  • Free Write
  • Gallery Tour
  • Gallery Walk
  • Heart Maps
  • Inside Outside Circles
  • Instead of a Journal
  • Journalists’ Questions
  • Little Feelings Book
  • Great First Lines
  • Poetry With a Purpose
  • PWIM: What’s in a Picture?
  • Research Report
  • Scene One
  • Seeing Both Sides
  • Serendipity Writing
  • Stretching a Setting
  • Summarizing Text
  • Swatch Tower Poetry Image
  • Visceral Poems
  • W4
  • Walk on the Wild Side
  • What’s in a List?
  • Words for Wordless
  • Write Like a Writer
  • Writing in Role: The Pitch

Creative Commons License
Literacy 44 by North Vancouver School District is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

NVSD 44 Logo