Cause and Effect Tree

Authors often rely on the cause and effect text structure to explain, show order, change character behavior, and create plot. Since cause and effect may be a difficult concept for your students to understand, or they may not have been taught this literary element before, you may want to model and teach this concept before you assign this project to your students.

---

It would be a good idea to read aloud a book and then use that book as an example to teach cause and effect relationships to your students.

Below is a list of books that you could use that contain cause and effect relationships in them. This list only contains short picture book titles because it would likely take too long to read aloud a longer book to your students to use as a teaching example.

• Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst
• If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff
• The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown
• Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears by Verna Aardema
• Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes
• The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash by Trinka Hakes Noble
• Chicken Little by Steven Kellog
• Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
• Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
• The Napping House by Audrey and Don Wood

 

A good strategy is to teach the three types of cause and effect relationships:

• Stated: Stated cause and effect relationships are clearly stated in the text and often involve signal words.
• Unstated: Unstated relationships require that students make an inference.
• Sequential: In sequential cause and effect relationships, effects may be part of a chain in which one effect goes on to cause a second effect, and so on.

In your examples that you are modeling to your students, try to find cause and effect relationships that are easy to identify because they are in the same sentence or use signal words to identify them.

Then, explain to your students that many times cause and effect relationships in stories do not occur in the same sentence and are not associated with signal words. Try to find cause and effect examples from the story that you read to your students that do not occur in the same sentence and that do not contain signal clues.

 

For this project, students write the causes in the tree's branches and the effects in the tree's leaves.

Leave an area for students to draw a picture of a cause and effect on the trunk.

• Book Information: Title, Author, Genre, and Name
• 6 Cause Branches
• 6 Large Effect Leaves
• 1 Trunk
•  Title oval template and a drawing area for a cause and effect.

12 Small Leaves for decoartion

 

Here are examples on how to design the tree. Of course this is a guide. If you have better ideas, please go ahead!

You can adapt the shape of the leaves. There are many templates on the internet. These oval ones are the easiest to cut, though.

I hope you like this project! I enjoyed sharing it with you 

Let me know how it worked for you. Your comments and ideas are welcome.