Use a Graphic Organiser to remember lessons

It’s a general tendency to get mixed up with things, concepts, theories and ideas when all are in the same box i.e the brain. Graphic organisers come handy when we pile up too many things in our brain. They ought to be compartmentalised to stay longer in our memory. GO-Graphic Organiser helps us catalogue information we gather and give it out to us as and when required. Almost every curriculum uses these tools to explain and reiterate concepts. Singapore Curriculum introduces its students to GOs at PP1 itself while NCERT uses them extensively in higher grades.

Venn diagram, Flow Chart, Family Tree etc are different kinds of GOs used in academics. A fishbone diagram or a herringbone map is used to identify the causes or composition of some complex system or event. Each bone coming off of the spine of the diagram is then broken down into more details. Examples of topics that fit well into fishbone diagrams include the causes of major wars, the manufacture of automobiles or the factors that influence juvenile delinquency. For teachers — this can be used to create lesson plans including brainstorming sessions or group research tasks. You can add on ribs based on any new sub topic-but the main topic is the fish bone lesson plan.

For students—you can use this to understand complex concepts in science, social studies or even languages. In fact there are Story-writing GOs too, which helps you map different limbs of a story based on which you will know which areas need to be worked upon.

The greatest advantage of GO is that the familiarity it brings when the student sees it simultaneously in the books, worksheets and computers. This gives ample exposure and eventually the usage. Thoughts start falling in place because it activates the logic which immediately starts organising information the minute it is fed into the mind. This may sound like feeding data into computer, but the advantage or the edge human mind has over the computer, here, is -bringing forth individual’s creativity, which reflects how the students use the tool and customises it as per their understanding.

Venn diagram is one simple useful GO which helps us understand similarities and differences. Mehul, who teaches Science to Class VIII says she uses flowcharts to simplify and interpret complex processes in science, be it chemistry or biology. Says Mehul “I always tell my students GOs are like photographs, you see them once, with complete focus and you remember every inch of it. It is just sealed in your memory and you don’t have the fear of forgetting something once you represent or ‘frame’ it in a GO. It just stays there. In fact many students tell me that it helped them in recalling various steps very easily and not to get mixed up with the names of different stages—eg-like in cell-division”

A Graphic Organiser helps you to-

• Structure writing project
• Make decisions
• Classify ideas and communicate
• Examine relationships
• Demonstrate thinking process
• Increase reading comprehension
• Brainstorm
• Organise essential concepts and ideas
• Making it clear how to break apart a story into the main elements (intro, rising action, climax, etc.)

No student can ever forget Charlotte’s Web, which stole every heart. Here’s a GO of it. So, next time you are having a difficulty to ‘arrest’ the information in your memory, take the help of a GO!