I just love GO’s – Graphic Organisers. Some might say that I am the GO Queen. I truly believe that they are a really good way of organising thoughts and ideas so I use them in the class all-the-time. Now I thought I had a pretty extensive list of links for graphic organisers in my del.cio.us account until I came across this beauty of a site listed on Langwitches Links for 2007-11-21 post that popped up in my google reader today.

Holt Interactive Graphic Organizers is one of the best sites I’ve seen for downloading GO templates in PDF form.  According to their details you can type in your comments and print them out after downloading the PDF file.

What really sets it apart from the sites that I’ve collected is the Graphic Organizer Teaching Notes. These are fantastic! All the GO’s are organised into sections stipulating which GO is best for the sort of information or idea you’d like to organise, click on the GO you’d like to try and hey presto – there’s a specific lesson plan for introducing it to your students. Included in the plan are “At a Glance – which I think is close to what we NZers would call Learning Intentions;  support for reading, and support for writing PLUS ideas for differentiating the lesson – now that’s handy.

I know this is a site that I will be visiting again and again and again.

This looked like a bit a fun ……. so I tried it …… (Thanks Jeff Utecht)

I’m not sure if it’s a compliment or not.

What’s your blog’s reading level?

It’s time to sit back, take a breath and soak up the thought, application of tools and effort of student entries for Chris Craft’s Life ‘Round Here project.

Thanks to generous people like Chris, people like me, have an idea presented to them, with parameters and a frame work, all open to further suggestions and tweaking, to take back to their students and do with it what they may.

Being involved in the Life  ‘Round Here project gave me the opportunity to consolidate the year’s learning in written language and oral language.  It allowed my students to explore their personal voice, express themselves in a creative way and examine the way they think living in New Zealand shapes the life that they lead.

We’ve got a block set aside tomorrow to watch the rest of the movies (we took a peek at a few other school’s entries today after uploading our final entry).  You can see the completed final projects here.  And I urge you to take a look at what 10-13 year olds from different parts of the world are doing.

Thanks for inviting us to take part Chris.  It was an absolute pleasure to be a part of this thought-provoking project.  Glad I’m not the one making the final decision of a winner(s) – deciding on our top 6 was hard enough!