I love graphic organizers. They are a fun, entertaining way to help the students to understand a topic more thoroughly. My favourite graphic organizer is the foldable. I wish that I would have done those in my high school classes.
Yesterday, I met up with my AT for my next practicum and he informed me that one of my students has a "visual/spatial" IEP. I had never heard about this before. Supposedly, one of the things he cannot process are graphic organizers. When you put one infront of him, his brain shuts down and they make no sense to him. I found this to be really perplexing because the purpose of graphic organizers is to break the thought process down to make things easier to understand. For him, it literally worked against what it was meant to do. My AT says that this one time he had his class making foldables for an English unit. The student's father had to phone into my AT to tell him that his son would not participate in this activity. The student had no problem writing down the information in a "note-taking" way, but as soon as he was presented with a foldable he could not do it. I thought it was something interesting that I would share.
I will be taking over this class soon, so I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for other modifications I could use that would help?
Here is a website that printable graphic organizers. I think it's a great resource!
About Me
- Deb Murdoch
- I am I/S English & History Teacher Candidate for Althouse at UWO, proud mommy of one spoiled pup, bargain hunter and clothing addict.
Wow, that's really interesting I've also never heard of that one before. Perhaps if the student is good with taking notes than a good strategy to use with that class would be to take notes in the old school way and then go back over them and use different coloured highlighters to sort the information into different groupings instead of different sections of the foldable. I like this strategy for preparing for essay writting. But I guess you'll just have to meet this lad to see what works for him. I'd try to take a look in his notebook if he's ok with it and see how he works things out. Very interesting. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteDeb, I am dealing with a student who has similar dificulties with spatial/visual issues. She was given two letters on one page that both need to be done in succession, however, she ended up mixing them up into one convaluted letter. I believe one of the best ways to deal with this (and what I will be attempting) is giving her a step by step instruction of how to complete the task, I will put each step on a separate sheet of paper, making a small 'flip-book' like instruction manual for her. I hope this works, and good luck with your student.
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