How can I help my child organize his elementary school research report?
Although parents often like outlines - they seem very formal and organized - outlines are often daunting for kids. They seem too text-y, with too much about indenting and moving things around. For children, the first method of organization I like to use is bubbles. You put your main concept in the middle. We can talk about dolphins, and then what they eat. We put that they eat little fish, like plankton. Why are they special? They communicate with one another. Where do they live? They live in the ocean, in salt water. Then look at the different sorts of oceans and climates that they live in. It gives children a way of organizing their work: each little bubble and the facts around it become one of the child's paragraphs. That's a really visual way for the child to see the information that goes together. Other kids, you start having them write a bubble thing, and it's all over the place. By the time they fill in one bubble the whole page is filled, they've got lines squiggling all over it, and it doesn't help them organize at all. For those kids, sometimes it's better to use separate pieces of paper. On one piece of people you say what dolphins eat. On that piece of paper the child gets to write down everything they know about dolphins eating. Then, on a new piece of paper, where do they live? They live in the ocean, they live in these oceans, they live in these kinds of temperatures, etc. That way everything has its own piece of paper. When a child is going to put together each paragraph, they've got an organized set of notes for each topic.
