Students who have difficulty seeing relationships may also have trouble drawing conclusions, making predictions or drawing inferences. Teachers can help students develop their abilities to see patterns and relationships by giving students many opportunities to classify and visualize data. Classification activities can be as simple as asking students to create a simple wheel with spokes to generating a complex concept map. Once students have organized the information, be sure to have them explain the relationships and why they organized the data in the way they did.
3 Replies to “Making Connections – Seeing Relationships”
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What if the problem really is “seeing” not relationships in the cognitive sense nor visually? Hundreds of thousands of children have perceptual disorders in which the words or letter on the page looks like they are moving or bunching together much like the rest of us see optical illusions. For these children, colored overlays or specially made colored filters can make a world of difference and these kids no longer struggle to read. One such processing disorder is called Irlen Syndrome. We discovered it at http://www.irlen.com. It helps many children (and even adults) who have been struggling to read. It also helps with symptoms from autism, brain injuries and other illnesses. It’s worth checking out and hopefully writing about so other parents can possibly help their children.
Yes, I agree. I have used colored overlays with children with perceptual problems before with good success. As you say, it is definitely worth trying.
I agree that providing students with opportunities to categorize, classify, and visualize data is helpful in establishing patterns and relationships. I find that graphic organizers are a perfect way to accomplish this. These graphic organizers range from venn diagrams, word webs, sequencing charts, to story maps, and the list goes on… Collections of graphic organizers in book form are available from teacher resource catalogs, some of which are made for interactive white boards. In my experience, it has been beneficial for students to use graphic organizers as a place to record information, thoughts, and ideas, in an organized manner.