#STORY ELEMENTS ANCHOR CHART FIRST GRADE HOW TO#

So many of my students don’t understand how to compare and contrast effectively. The intersection between the two circles is the space to fill in the similarities between them.

These are the differences between the texts. The students would fill in the points about each text in the relevant circle. One element that a number of compare and contrast anchor charts features is that of two circles that intersect. You can also have a grid that features the texts and similarities and differences. The students could fill in the two columns from specific texts. Another effective way of doing this is to have two columns on the chart, labelled ‘similarities’ and ‘differences’. The chart could have a blank space at the bottom, where you can fill in information about different texts. There are some different approaches you can use to achieve this. The chart must make provision for being able to work with specific texts. Essentially, a good compare and contrast anchor chart should be highly visual. A different color for each text is also useful, so is using different colors for differences and similarities. The anchor chart can use columns to separate the texts. With a subject like compare and contrast, this is especially important, as the students will be learning to work with two texts separately and then together. This can be something like: ‘compare’ means to look for similarities and ‘contrast’ is to look for what is different.Īny good anchor chart must be set out efficiently and use elements like font, color and shape to organize the content. The elements of a good compare and contrast anchor chartĪ good compare and contrast anchor chart should make it absolutely clear what the two ideas mean.

Final thoughts on compare and contrast anchor charts.

The elements of a good compare and contrast anchor chart.

Others are ideas you can adapt to your classroom. There are resources you can access from TeachSimple. In this post, I discuss what should go into a compare and contrast anchor chart and give you some examples of useful charts. You can use anchor charts as a visual aid or reference to help students learn to look at two texts critically to find differences and similarities.

When students compare and contrast two texts, that is essentially what they are doing. Pitting two things against each other sounds like a strange thing to do in class.

Story elements anchor chart first grade