Teaching Cause and Effect Through Film and Text

Thanks to Scott @ mytopten.com.au

Teaching Cause and Effect can be an interesting thing to address and shows children that in life and in stories, every effect has a cause. You can start to talk to the children about out in the yard...

Things such as when you kick a ball and it bounces away is a cause/effect relationship. Another one might be when someone gets angry in the yard because someone threw a rock at them is also a cause/effect relationship.

As you progress through the slideshow on cause and effect, you will notice that the children will be engaged by the movies and the cause/effect relationships within them. It is important that we as teachers, point out these relationships from an authors view and then discuss the needs of us as readers. As authors we need to address our readers' needs by challenging them to make sense of the actions of characters.

As a follow up activity, I suggest that you get an A3 piece of paper and divide in half (Lengthways) and make two columns called 'Cause' and the other 'Effect'. The children should then use these pieces of paper to review cause/effect relationships within their own novels. They can then get a picture off the net to decorate the back of the paper and hang them around the room. You will find lots of children will then refer to these to make sense of these texts if they are reading them at a later date.