Exploring Cause and Effect Using Expository Texts About Natural Disasters
This lesson helps students explore the nature and structure of expository texts that focus on cause and effect using books on natural disasters. Expository texts are a key component of literacy, but they are often not getting introduced to students until the later grades. This lesson will be valuable to teachers introducing their students to more expository text. In the lesson, students begin by activating prior knowledge about cause and effect; the teacher then models discovering these relationships in a text and recording in a graphic organizer what the relationships that the class finds. Then, students work in small groups to apply what they learned using related books and then write paragraphs outlining the cause-and-effect relationships they have found. *This is crosscurricular with science since it covers natural disasters.
