Last Updated on July 6, 2024 by Editorial Team
Being a powerful visual tool, graphic organizers can be used for reading, as well as writing. Reading is an activity that can help one understand words, it, in turn, fills the human mind with knowledge and wisdom. Graphic organizers when used for reading comprehension can make reading more enjoyable and effective.
Being a visual display that organizes ideas and shows the relationships between concepts or information, these organizers work well even for children who have some learning disability. Hence, in this post, we will navigate through the importance of graphic organizers for reading comprehension, and will also provide you with some free downloadable reading comprehension sheets that you can put to use with your little learner.
Benefits of using graphic organizers for reading comprehension
Want to use graphic organizers in your classroom? Here are some of the benefits it offers:
1. Improves Understanding
Students who use graphic organizers have a better grasp and a deeper knowledge of the subject they are reading or studying because they can better see and internalize it. Through this visual organizing, readers can perceive the ties and connections to the material they are reading and learning, which improves comprehension.
2. Useful for all age groups
These graphic organizers offer a hands-on learning method, they are an excellent tool for all age groups including individuals with learning difficulties. Additionally, these help with the ability to summarize, recognize important concepts and details, draw conclusions from new material, and relate it to existing knowledge.
3. Improved Student Engagement
Students are able to maintain concentration because they express information in a pattern graphically. Being different from traditional classroom teaching, a student can focus more and it would thus positively impact the student engagement rate. Being well structured, and a bit out of the box, the child would be ecstatic to learn from these graphic organizers.
4. Structured and Methodical Form of Learning
By adopting a methodical graphic organizer, students can increase their productivity. Since the graphical organizers are structured in a particular way, they can eliminate chaos, and promote a methodical form of learning.
5. Knowledge Assessment
Students, adults, and working professionals can fill out graphic organizers to help instructors gauge their prior knowledge of a subject. As a result, educators may also strategically decide how to provide students with additional information about the problem
What’s included in this graphic organizer?
Visualizing and constructing ideas, organizing and/or sequencing information, planning what to write, improving reading comprehension, brainstorming, or organizing can all be assisted by using graphic organizers. Below are some of the graphic organizers that can be employed to improve reading comprehension
1. Summarizing Chart

Reading comprehension is about understanding the entire scenario and characters. This summarizing chart helps readers draft their understanding post-reading.
- It includes drafting down the main topic of the comprehension and connecting it like a story.
- There are 5 containers titled – What, Where, When, Why, and How.
- These containers induce the readers to go back to the main idea of the comprehension and write their thoughts.
- Readers can build their memory and describe the entire story or an event through descriptive writing in the containers.
- It also helps readers summarize their understanding of an incident, a novel, or simply reviewing a book.
This helps improve memory, increases concentration, and drafts ideas in a creative manner.
2. Story Elements Chart

Do you know readers are likely to remember stories even after they have completed reading? Some stories catch their attention which creates a long-lasting memory in their brains. Reading engages the brain in different thought processes thereby activating the human mind for varied imaginations.
- The story elements chart is extremely useful to understand the story, characters, scene, and main idea, and to draft their understanding.
- The containers – setting and characters are helpful for readers to pen down their knowledge of the story setting along with characters, their roles, and descriptions.
- This enhances observational skills and pays attention to the character’s personality, dressing, and other details.
- Topic and Author container is ideal for making readers learn about different authors and their styles of writing as they engage in reading about them.
- This chart also includes the Plot container to write about the main part of the story, where it occurs, and its genre.
- Problem and Solution containers let the readers pay attention to the crucial part of the story wherein they can write about the problem statement followed by the ideal solution.
3. KWL Chart

This graphic organizer provides a KWL Chart where readers can briefly note their understanding of the subject matter. Readers might not be able to understand certain parts of a story, novel, or comprehension.
- The first column allows readers to mention their understanding of what they already know about the subject matter.
- The second column helps them describe what they want to know from the reading session.
- It also allows them to put deeper thought into what interests them.
- The third column is more like a concluding container. readers have to mention their learning post reading a story or comprehension.
This chart is readers-friendly as they can freely express their willingness to explore specific topics. It makes readers confident by drafting the things they know and have learned. Such a chart creates self-awareness among readers.
4. Story Sequence Chart

A story reading takes different routes throughout the reading journey. A story includes characters and their different personality traits, descriptive scenarios, problems, and solutions. This chart helps readers mention the story in a step-by-step format.
- The containers are placed in a process layout to draft the happenings of a story in smaller formats.
- Readers can take note of the beginning and thoroughly describe the middle part and end with the climax in the given containers.
- It allows readers to concentrate deeply on the reading process and sharpen their memory through writing.
Such a chart is extremely helpful to sharpen memory and enhance critical thinking. The story sequence chart also teaches them how the structure is important when forming their own stories.
5. Main Idea Chart

The Main Idea Chart again follows a distinctive format to help readers identify the subject matter of the topic.
- Readers have to note down the topic along with their understanding of the central theme or idea.
- This boosts their creativity and improves their imagination.
- The 3 containers help readers draft their supporting points from the reading comprehension or the story.
- Readers can also focus on the central theme, derive their own ideas, and create multiple stories through it.
This chart helps them recognize and select the supporting ideas along with their understanding of the prime subject matter.
6. Character Trait Chart

Every story has different characters along with their qualities, grooming descriptions, and their nature.
- The character trait chart helps readers note different qualities and include the supporting points that stand as proof.
- Let’s say, a particular story mentions a girl with blonde hair. In this, the trait can be beautiful while the supporting point is the blonde hair.
This particular chart helps improve their vocabulary as readers are involved in descriptive writing. It also helps them understand how to address a variety of people and situations with the right words in real life.
Conclusion
With the aid of graphic organizers, you may visualize your thoughts. The illustrations show the connections between ideas, thoughts, or facts and direct your thoughts while creating the map or diagram. Learning disabled individuals frequently learn and think visually. This means that when ideas, words, and concepts are linked to images, diagrams, charts, and maps, they are better understood and remembered.
It can help you in reading out the framed stories and also reflects creativity. This can be a great helpful resource in schools, and teaching aids and as well help you in delivering perfect presentations.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,