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The following lesson adapts an idea from "Implementing Graphic Organizer Notebooks" by Fisher in the October 2001 issue of The Reading Teacher (Volume 55, Number 2, pages 117-120). The article discusses the implementation of bound books containing various graphic organizers to scaffold student understanding of content material and student note-taking abilities. The author describes the importance of suiting the graphic organizer to the specific text that is being read by mimicking the author's organization style. She gives an example of various graphical organizers that students could use throughout a unit on "Changes in Landform." Not only did the graphic organizer notebooks serve as scaffold for note-taking, but they also served as study tools for a test and motivations for student interest, according to the article.

While I did not actually get to use this approach in my lessons, I though this approach would have been an exciting way for students to process information in our geometry unit. While this unit did not involve a lot of reading material, I thought that the consistent use of graphic organizers throughout the unit might have been an interesting alternative to the geometry dictionaries that I had students keep. The graphical organizers serve two purposes in the lesson - first as a means to learn the content area, consistent with the way that article describes, but the organizers can also be useful in illustrating mathematical properties through diagrams and pictures. To this extent, the graphical organizers would serve two purposes.

In thinking about how I would use the organizers in the lesson, I would first think about how the organizers would be used throughout the unit. The idea of creating bound "books" for students to take notes in is very appealing, and it would probably make the organizers more useful if students are using them all of the time. With this is mind, I will now describe the changes I would make to a lesson on types of quadrilaterals.

There is little I would actually change in the lesson, in terms of the activities I had already planned. Instead, I would use the graphical organizers as a means to add to this framework. I would have provided students with a simple graphical organizer with lines and spaces for students to write in each of the three properties I want students to exam (side length, angle types, parallel sides) while they were working in groups to discuss the properties. I would have students keep track of the different properties of all five quadrilaterals on a separate sheet which provided spaces for properties of all five types. I would also want to provide students with a Venn Diagram or flowchart that they could fill in to isolate the connections between the shapes (like a square is both a rhombus and a rectangle). I would want students to fill these in as we were discussing the properties in the large group. Then, when they began their small group work, they could refer back to these organizers if they are feeling stuck, or if they forgot the properties of one type of quadrilaterals.

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