informative essay graphic organizer 6th grade

Informational Text Graphic Organizers

These informational text graphic organizers will meet nonfiction reading standards for 4th, 5th and 6th grades.

You can download this PDF containing 32 informational text graphic organizers for your intermediate reading workshop.

These worksheets will help you address many nonfiction standards in 4th and 5th grades.

This is another free resource for teachers and homeschool families from The Curriculum Corner.

We are sharing a complete collection of 32 free informational text graphic organizers for your intermediate classroom.

This huge collection of 32 graphic organizers is designed to address most of the intermediate informational text standards. They address key ideas & details, craft & structure and integration of knowledge & ideas.

These will be a welcome addition to your reading workshop!

Because this collection contains resources for fourth through sixth grade students, it will also make differentiating easier if you are looking to find similar organizers at different levels.

How to Use These Graphic Organizers

We always suggest modeling each graphic organizer before students are asked to complete one independently. This can make for a meaningful mini-lesson.  

Seeing how an organizer is correctly completed will help students fully understand the task they are being asked to complete. It’s also a great opportunity for you to model aloud your thinking as you work.

Model completing the organizer with the help of your students.

Showing students how you think through the process of completing an organizer can help them be successful in the future when completing their own.

It is a valuable lesson because as you complete the organizer, you are sharing your thinking. This then helps them

After completing an organizer as a class, be sure to display the sample so students can use it as a resource when needed.

An option for independent reading time is to create a storage spot for organizers students have been taught to use. They can pick a page that is a good fit for their current book.

Once or twice during the week, students can choose an organizer that fits their current independent reading selection and complete the organizer.

This option gives students choice and encourages some independence.

You will find these ideas covered in these graphic organizers:

Writing questions

You can download this free set of reading graphic organizers here:

Reading Download

As with all of our resources, The Curriculum Corner creates these for free classroom use. Our products may not be sold. You may print and copy for your personal classroom use. These are also great for home school families!

You may not modify and resell in any form. Please let us know if you have any questions.

States & Capitals Matching Cards - The Curriculum Corner 4-5-6

Tuesday 19th of November 2019

[…] Key Ideas & Informational Text Graphic Organizers […]

Preparing Your Reading Workshop - The Curriculum Corner 123

Monday 10th of June 2019

[…] Literature for 4th and 5th                 Informational Text for 4th and 5th […]

nancy alevras

Tuesday 9th of April 2019

Thank you for sharing your resources!

Monday 20th of August 2018

Hi there, I love all of your products and am so appreciative. Your link for 4 th and 5th Graphic Organizers for informational text is not working. I would love to have these! Mary [email protected]

Jill & Cathy

Hi Mary, we just tested the link and didn't have problems on our end downloading the PDF. Maybe it was a problem with the connection or something. If you try again and still experience difficulty, please email us and let us know the error message you are receiving. We will try to help you problem solve.

Reader's Notebook for Students - The Curriculum Corner 123

Saturday 18th of February 2017

[…] Grades 4-5 Graphic Organizers for Informational Text […]

About this Interactive

Related resources.

Expository writing is an increasingly important skill for elementary, middle, and high school students to master. This interactive graphic organizer helps students develop an outline that includes an introductory statement, main ideas they want to discuss or describe, supporting details, and a conclusion that summarizes the main ideas. The tool offers multiple ways to navigate information including a graphic in the upper right-hand corner that allows students to move around the map without having to work in a linear fashion. The finished map can be saved, e-mailed, or printed.

• Student Interactives
• Strategy Guides
• Lesson Plans
• Calendar Activities

The Persuasion Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to map out their arguments for a persuasive essay or debate.

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This strategy guide explains the writing process and offers practical methods for applying it in your classroom to help students become proficient writers.

This strategy guide clarifies the difference between persuasion and argumentation, stressing the connection between close reading of text to gather evidence and formation of a strong argumentative claim about text.

Students will identify how Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of nonviolent conflict-resolution is reinterpreted in modern texts. Homework is differentiated to prompt discussion on how nonviolence is portrayed through characterization and conflict. Students will be formally assessed on a thesis essay that addresses the Six Kingian Principles of Nonviolence.

Students develop their reading, writing, research, and technology skills using graphic novels. As a final activity, students create their own graphic novels using comic software.

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While drafting a literary analysis essay (or another type of argument) of their own, students work in pairs to investigate advice for writing conclusions and to analyze conclusions of sample essays. They then draft two conclusions for their essay, select one, and reflect on what they have learned through the process.

Students analyze rhetorical strategies in online editorials, building knowledge of strategies and awareness of local and national issues. This lesson teaches students connections between subject, writer, and audience and how rhetorical strategies are used in everyday writing.

It's not easy surviving fourth grade (or third or fifth)! In this lesson, students brainstorm survival tips for future fourth graders and incorporate those tips into an essay.

Students explore the nature and structure of expository texts that focus on cause and effect and apply what they learned using graphic organizers and writing paragraphs to outline cause-and-effect relationships.

Students prepare an already published scholarly article for presentation, with an emphasis on identification of the author's thesis and argument structure.

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Explore Resources by Grade

• Kindergarten K

How to Teach Informative Writing

n this post, I share 5 tips for How to Teach Informative Writing and provide details about my Informational Writing Unit resources for for Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade students. Be sure to download 3 FREE Informational Writing Graphic Organizers!

We write for a variety of purposes. The most popular are to inform, entertain, explain, or persuade. While we teach our students to write for each of these different purposes, the ability to effectively write an informative piece of writing is a highly important skill for students to learn. It is one of the most common types of writing we use in our everyday lives.

Today I’m excited to share 5 tips for teaching informational writing, as well as a valuable resource that has everything you need to teach informative writing to your kindergarten , first grade , or second grade students! 

1.  Read Informative Writing Mentor Texts 

As a teacher, you may “Start with the end in mind”  when you plan out your units of study, but it also applies to students learning about different genres of writing.  Before you can ask your students to write in a genre that is new to them, you must first immerse them in it.  

So to begin your informational writing unit, you’ll want to share lots of quality informational texts with your students.  These mentor texts provide students with excellent examples of informational writing. As you read them aloud, highlight the way the author structures their writing and the features they include to help make their writing more clear for the reader.  All of these things will help students better understand what type of writing we are asking them to do.    

When you’re picking informative mentor texts to share with your students there are a few things to consider .  First, do you (the educator) think it is excellent?  Second, is it easy for your students to understand?  And finally, is it relevant to the type of writing you are teaching?  If you answer “Yes!” to all three, then you’re good to go!

To help you out I’ve created a list of excellent mentor texts you can use when teaching Informative Writing to kindergarten, first, or second grade students.  

A List of Informative Writing Mentor Texts:

Gail Gibbons

• The Moon Book
• The Pumpkin Book

Nicola Davies

• One Tiny Turtle
• Big Blue Whale
• Bat Loves the Night
• Surprising Sharks

Jim Arnosky

• Slither and Crawl
• Frozen Wild
• Beachcombing: Exploring the Seashore

Diana Aston

• An Egg is Quiet
• A Beetle is Shy
• A Seed is Sleepy
• A Rock is Lively

I’ve saved all these titles on one board so you can easily take a closer look at these mentor texts. Click here to see this list on Amazon .  

2.   Model Your Own Informational Writing

Never underestimate the importance of modeling!  It’s the most powerful tool in your arsenal.  

When teaching informative writing first model how to choose a topic.  Picking a topic is fun and easy because you get to choose something you already know a lot about!

Remind students that they are already experts in so many areas!!  This can be a big confidence booster for kids who might normally struggle to come up with ideas to write about.  Use think alouds to show them how you brainstorm a list of topics you already know a lot about and show them how you narrow it down to one.  

Next, model how you gather information and organize your ideas.  For informative writing you can show them how you use your prior knowledge, as well as pull important information from outside resources like books and websites. 

Finally, reread your work aloud and show students how you catch silly mistakes such as spelling, capitalization or punctuation errors.  You can also show how you add more details to make your piece more informative for your reader.  

3.  Use Anchor Charts

You want your students to know that when they write an informative piece they are sharing facts, or true information, with their reader. They are not sharing their opinion. It is important to take time to review fact vs. opinion with your students. You can create an anchor chart that clearly defines fact vs. opinion and then practice determining if different statements are facts or opinions.

You will also want to create an anchor chart using the writing you model. This will serve as another example of excellent informative writing. As a class, add labels to identify the topic sentence, supporting facts/details and the closing sentence in your shared writing. 

Post these anchor charts in your writing center so your students can refer back to them and use them as support as they write their own pieces.

4.  Allow students to edit and share their writing

Provide a good writers checklist at your writing center.  For informative writing you’ll want the checklist to include items such,  “Does my writing have a topic sentence?”  “Did I include enough facts?” and “Do I have a closing sentence?”, as well reminders to check for spelling, capitalization, and punctuation errors.  

Give students the opportunity to share their writing with others!  Pair students with partners and let them read their pieces to each other. 

You can teach them to provide each other with a bit of feedback by encouraging them to use sentence starters such as, “I like the way you….:” ,  “I learned that….” or “Your writing made me wonder….”.  Of course, this is also something you’d first want to model. Posting these sentence starters in your writing center provides support and helps to keep students focused and on-task.  

 5. Provide Daily Opportunities for Students to Write

As with all things, writing takes PRACTICE!  Informative writing requires students to do a lot of hard work. It requires that they think carefully about their purpose for writing. Then they must plan what they’ll say and how they’ll say it.

Finally, they’ve got to get it down on the paper in a way that is clear for the reader.   That’s a lot for a young child! 

Students need dedicated instructional time to learn the skills and strategies necessary to become effective writers, as well as time to practice what they learn. When you think about your daily instructional schedule, make sure you are giving your students ample opportunities to practice their informational writing through whole group instruction, small groups and/or through independent practice in writing centers. 

Informative Writing Unit For Kindergarten, First, and Second Grade Students

We know informational writing requires a lot from students, but planning these informative writing units is also A LOT of work for you as the teacher!

To help you out I created informative writing units that have the essential resources you need to teach and students to independently practice informational writing!  These units are a perfect addition to your literacy work in writing centers.

Today I’m excited to share with you the details about my Kindergarten Informative , 1st Grade Informative, and my 2nd grade Informative writing units!

These units were developed with standards-based research specific to each grade. They have EVERYTHING you need to give your students ample amounts of practice writing informational pieces. You can use them within whole class or small group lessons, or as a literacy center where students can practice independently!  

What’s Included in these Informative Writing Resources?

The kindergarten , first grade, and the second grade resources all include information to help you teach the unit, as well as mini-lesson to provide your students a review of informative writing.  You’ll get a list of suggested mentor texts and online resources, academic vocabulary posters, a printable fact vs. opinion anchor chart, and graphic organizers appropriate for each grade level.

The kindergarten resource also includes the materials needed for students to create seasonal writing mini-books . Each mini-book comes with traceable sentence stems and a picture supported vocabulary word bank. This helps your young writers brainstorm ideas for what to write about and support their spelling.

You’ll also get an editing checklist that is specific to informative writing but also appropriate for the kindergarten level.

Instead of a seasonal mini-book, the first grade and second grade resource comes with seasonal writing prompts . You’ll get 5 informative writing prompts for each season, so you can practice informative writing all throughout the year. 

The prompts are both PRINTABLE & DIGITAL.  The digital version has been  PRELOADED  for you,  with 1 click add them  to your Google Drive or upload them to SeeSaw.

Each seasonal prompt also comes with publishing paper that includes a story specific vocabulary bank to provide spelling support and help students get ideas for what to write about.  

Finally, you’ll also get a self-editing checklist and rubric that have both been made specifically for informative writing.  This rubric can be used to help guide students as they work on their pieces, and/or as a self-assessment tool.     

I love these resources because they can be used in so many different ways.  They offer opportunities for students to practice informative writing as a whole class, in small groups, as a literacy center activity, for homework, or as a meaningful activity for when you have a substitute teacher!  They provide k-2 students with all the practice they need to master informative writing! 

FREE Informational Writing Graphic Organizers

Are you ready to begin teaching informative writing in your classroom? To help get your students started, I am happy to offer you 3 FREE informational writing graphic organizers! Download them here!

Helping your students to develop their ability to explain their ideas and share information with others is a valuable academic and life skill they will use well beyond the walls of your classroom.  I hope the information and resources I’ve shared today will help to bring stronger informative writing instruction and more meaningful practice to your kindergarten, first and second grade classrooms!

Be on the lookout for my next post that will focus on another genre… Opinion Writing ! I’ll share information and tips for teaching opinion writing, as well as give you details about my Opinion Writing Units for Kindergarten , First and Second grade students!

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6th Grade Reading and Literature Graphic Organizers

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EL Education Curriculum

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• ELA 2019 G6:M1:U2:L8

Compare and Contrast Essay: Plan Introduction

In this lesson, daily learning targets, ongoing assessment.

• Technology and Multimedia

Supporting English Language Learners

Materials from previous lessons, new materials, closing & assessments, you are here:.

• ELA 2019 Grade 6
• ELA 2019 G6:M1
• ELA 2019 G6:M1:U2

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Focus Standards:  These are the standards the instruction addresses.

• RL.6.1, RL.6.7, W.6.2a, W.6.2b, W.6.4, W.6.5, W.6.9a

Supporting Standards:  These are the standards that are incidental—no direct instruction in this lesson, but practice of these standards occurs as a result of addressing the focus standards.

• W.6.10, SL.6.1, L.6.6
• I can compare and contrast what I see and hear when I read the text to what I perceive when I watch the same scene of the film. (RL.6.7)
• I can plan the introduction of a compare and contrast essay with a strong focus statement. (W.6.2a)
• Work Time A: Compare and Contrast Film and Text: The Lightning Thief note-catcher (RL.6.1, RL.6.7, W.6.2b, W.6.5, W.6.9a)
• Work Time B: Language Dive: Focus Statement (W.6.2a, SL.6.1)
• Work Time C: Introduction: Informative/Explanatory Writing Plan graphic organizer (RL.6.1, RL.6.7, W.6.2a, W.6.4, W.6.5, W.6.9a)
• Review the student tasks and example answers to get familiar with what students will be required to do in the lesson (see Materials list).
• Record the following on the board for students as they arrive:
• Retrieve and review your Compare and Contrast Film and Text: The Lightning Thief note-catcher. Put a star next to one of your observations about a similarity or difference, and be ready to share it with the whole group during our discussion.
• Strategically pair students for work in Opening A with at least one strong reader per pair.
• Preview the Language Dive Guide, and invite conversation among students to address the language goals suggested under each sentence chunk strip (see Materials list). Select from the questions and goals provided to best meet students' needs.
• Prepare copies of handouts for students, including entrance ticket (see Materials list).
• Post the learning targets and applicable anchor charts (see Materials list).

Tech and Multimedia

• Work Time A: Use an interactive online resource such as http://eled.org/0126 to conduct the comparison.

Supports guided in part by CA ELD Standards 6.I.B.6, 6.I.C.10, 6.II.B.4, 6.II.B.5, and 6.II.C.1.

Important Points in the Lesson Itself

• To support ELLs, this lesson provides students with additional time to complete an exercise that was begun in Lesson 7, incorporating a Language Dive that deconstructs the focus statement of the Compare and Contrast Model Essay , and strengthening writing development through the planning of the introductions of students' own essays. Additionally, an Informative Writing checklist helps make explicit the expectations of students' writing and allows opportunities for them to track progress and self-assess.
• ELLs may find it challenging to see the focus statement of the Compare and Contrast Model Essay as a model that can be manipulated in their own writing. Point out during the Language Dive that this focus statement is simple and clear, and emphasize during the Practice section that there are many ways to make it more specific or academic in their own essays (e.g., by adding a semicolon and the phrase for example ).
• differences, reveal, similarities (A)
• comparison, introduction (DS)

(A): Academic Vocabulary

(DS): Domain-Specific Vocabulary

• Compare and Contrast Film and Text: The Lightning Thief note-catcher (example for teacher reference) (from Unit 2, Lesson 7, Work Time B)
• Close Readers Do These Things anchor chart (one to display; from Unit 1, Lesson 4, Opening A)
• Academic word wall (begun in Unit 1, Lesson 1, Opening A)
• Work to Become Effective Learners anchor chart (one to display; begun in Unit 1, Lesson 5, Work Time A)
• Work to Become Effective Learners anchor chart (example for teacher reference) (from Unit 1, Lesson 5, Work Time A)
• Annotated Compare and Contrast Model Essay (example for teacher reference) (from Unit 2, Lesson 6, Work Time A)
• Domain-specific word wall (begun in Unit 1, Lesson 1, Opening A)
• Compare and Contrast Film and Text: The Lightning Thief note-catcher (one per student; from Unit 2, Lesson 7, Work Time B)
• Vocabulary logs (one per student; begun in Unit 1, Lesson 2, Work Time B)
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (one per student; text; from Unit 1, Lesson 1, Work Time C)
• Compare and Contrast Model Essay (one per student; from Unit 2, Lesson 6, Work Time A)
• Painted Essay® Template (one per student; from Unit 2, Lesson 6, Work Time C)
• Language Dive Guide: Compare and Contrast Model Essay Focus Statement (for teacher reference)
• Language Dive: Compare and Contrast Model Essay Focus Statement note-catcher (example for teacher reference)
• Language Dive: Compare and Contrast Model Essay Focus Statement sentence chunk strips (one to display)
• Colored pencil (red)
• Criteria for an Effective Informative Essay anchor chart (example for teacher reference) Informative Writing checklist (example for teacher reference)
• Criteria for an Effective Informative Essay anchor chart (one to display; co-created during Work Time B)
• Informative/Explanatory Writing Plan graphic organizer (example for teacher reference)
• Language Dive: Compare and Contrast Model Essay Focus Statement note-catcher (one per student)
• Informative Writing checklist (one per student and one to display)
• Informative/Explanatory Writing Plan graphic organizer (one per student and one to display)

Each unit in the 6-8 Language Arts Curriculum has two standards-based assessments built in, one mid-unit assessment and one end of unit assessment. The module concludes with a performance task at the end of Unit 3 to synthesize students' understanding of what they accomplished through supported, standards-based writing.

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