Reading from the Textbook: Breaking Up the Routine, Part Three

Most of us catechists are appreciative to have excellent catechetical textbooks from which we can draw forth the content of our rich Catholic heritage. That’s a fancy way of saying that in our lessons, we plan to have students read from the textbook. The problem is, that can become very routine and boring. Fear not! There are ways we can break up the routine while still reading from the textbook. I covered some of these ideas in my most recent webinar, Growing as a Catechist, but I thought it would be helpful to take a closer look at these strategies, as well as a few others, in hopes that we can incorporate them into our overall approach. This third strategy is called, “Graphic Organizer.”

GRAPHIC ORGANIZER

• A graphic organizer is a worksheet that is given to students to help them identify and organize information they are reading silently from a text.
• The graphic organizer should be simple: a sheet of paper with 4 boxes such as:
  • BIG idea(s)
    • Key words
    • Most interesting idea
    • Huh? (concepts not understood)
• Assign a text to be read silently and provide each student with a graphic organizer.
• Go over the information they are to organize and then provide them with a set amount of time to complete the reading/organizing.
• As always, announce less time than is realistically possible to do the reading in order to create a sense of urgency…then you can extend the reading time a few minutes if needed
• Use the graphic organizer as a basis for your follow-up discussion.

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