The Graphic Map is designed to assist teachers and students in reading and writing activities. The organizer focuses on charting the high and low points related to a particular item or group of items, such as chapters in a book, amounts of money spent, events during a day, month, year, or life, or scenes in a play. The Graphic Map creates a graphic representation of these high and low points that displays related images and descriptions. The interactive can be used as a prewriting activity, as students map ideas for an autobiography; as a postreading activity, as students map the significance of events in a story; and as a reflection and assessment activity, as students map the high and low points of their inquiry process. For additional ideas on how to use this tool, see Tips for Using Graphic Map.

Visit this interactive tool at: http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/graphicmap/.

ReadWriteThink Lessons That Use This Tool

Bio-graph: Graphing Life Events (9-12)
This writing activity integrates mathematical graphing with writing and can be used to generate a number of different kinds of writing activities, but lends itself well to biographical and narrative writing. Students interview other students, choose significant life events, rate them, graph them, and write about one or more.

Book Clubs: Reading for Fun (3-5)
Students reading on their own and just for fun? Sure! This lesson explores how small groups of students decide to meet every other day to discuss what they've read in a "just for fun" book club they've organized—and that they control.

Creating Family Timelines: Graphing Family Memories and Significant Events (3-5)
In this lesson plan, students interview their parents and other family members to gather family stories and event information, using questions from a brainstormed list. They create a family-event timeline based on the information from their interviews and display their information using a graphic map.

Developing Reading Plans to Support Independent Reading  (6-8)
Students identify books they have read recently and look for patterns connecting those that they enjoyed the most. Once they've analyzed their past readings, students complete a reading plan, a simple wish list of books they hope to read in the future, based on their preferences in the past. The finished list becomes another supporting resource to guide independent readers.

Graphic Life Map (6-8)
In this prewriting activity for personal memoir or autobiographical writing, students brainstorm important memories, choose graphics to represent these memories, and construct a life map, connecting drawings and captions of high and low points with a highway.

Graphing Plot and Character in a Novel (3-5)
In this graphical mapping project, students assign a value to the events, characters, and themes in a novel and think about how the elements of the story are all interconnected. By reading and responding in this deeper fashion, students reach a greater level of comprehension for the novel. This lesson uses The Watsons Go To Birmingham—1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis as an example, but any text used in class can be substituted.

I Remember That Book: Rereading as a Critical Investigation (9-12)
Secondary students often resist reading assignments or don’t read with the verve their teachers might wish for. One way to confront this resistance to reading is to draw it out in the open and explore students’ histories as readers.

Mapping Characters Across Book Series (3-5)
How does a character change or stay the same through the course of a book? How also does that character grow and evolve through a book series? In this lesson, students will work on a guided characterization project, mapping the “life” of a character from a book series.

Paying Attention to Technology: Writing Technology Autobiographies (9-12)
In this lesson plan, students brainstorm lists of their interactions with technology, map these interactions graphically, and then compose narratives of their most significant interactions with technology. By writing these technology autobiographies, students explore what their stories reveal about why we use the technologies we do when we choose to use them.

Reading and Writing Workshop: Freak the Mighty (6-8)
This novel study of Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick includes the modeling and practicing of specific reading comprehension strategies, vocabulary and word study, a figurative language activity, and a selection of final projects which can be used for assessment with the accompanying rubric.

Talking, Writing, and Reasoning: Making Thinking Visible with Math Journals (3-5)
By talking, writing, and reasoning in math journals, students shift the emphasis of their work from finding the “right” answer to a metacognitive exploration of how their problem-solving works in ways that encourage them to apply, extend, and adapt their strategies to new situations. This lesson, which uses the Magic Triangle puzzle as an example, includes sample journal prompts and FAQs about math journals.

Texting a Response to Lord of the Flies (6-8)
After reading Lord of the Flies, students use text messages to create a summary of the book by choosing various scenes within the novel that prompt them to write a text message from one of the characters to an imagined audience off the island.

Using Personal Connections to Build an Understanding of Emotions (K-2)
In this lesson, students concretely define the abstract concept of emotions by using their own facial expressions as models, creating happy and sad masks, and discussing their personal experiences. The lesson is appropriate for prekindergarten through first-grade students.

Weekly Writer’s Blogs: Building a Reflective Community of Support (9-12)
In this digital rethinking of the traditional weekly writer’s logs, students analyze example writer’s blog entries then begin the habit of writing their own reflective weekly entries, which focus on the writing that they have done over the past seven days.

Writing and Assessing an Autobiographical Incident (3-5)
An autobiographical incident, a story students can tell about an event in their own lives, can be a powerful teaching tool at the beginning of the school year. It is a wonderful way to introduce students to each other because the author shares experiences and feelings about an event.