Graphic Organizers with Class Novels by Maria Copp

Part of what I love about teaching the same novel a few years in a row is the chance to gradually tweak and refine the lessons and tools I use during the unit. In the 2024-25 school year I taught three class novels, and for each unit students used a specific graphic organizer I had designed to guide them throughout the story. Though all three were novels I had taught before, two of the graphic organizers were brand new. 

A few reasons graphic organizers work great with class novel units:

• Assist students who have missed chunks of the story due to absences
• Refresh memories of students who struggle to recall what happened in the previous section of the story
• Help me as the teacher stay focused on main takeaways
• Reveal patterns across the story
• Hold students accountable for their comprehension when reading aloud with a partner

First quarter I hook my reluctant readers in with Long Way Down (Jason Reynolds). In this fast paced novel written in verse, the main character (Will) is trying to decide whether to get revenge on his brother’s killer. The majority of the story takes place in a single elevator ride, where the protagonist is visited by a new ghost on each floor as he descends, armed, towards the lobby. Each ghost is a loved one from his past who was killed. The segmentation of the book by floor offers students a natural opportunity to track progress in the story. In fact, completing the graphic organizer with students is what helped me notice an important pattern across the book–the ghosts never offer the protagonist advice, but instead ask Will probing questions designed to make him think about his upcoming choice to seek revenge. Thanks to this revelation, I started making this theme of questioning a key part of my discussion of the book and incorporated a column in our graphic organizer specifically for the ghosts’ questions.

Students kept their paper copy in their binder, and at the end of each lesson, we worked as a class to complete a section of the following graphic organizer:

Second quarter I read Sold (Patricia McCormick) with my classes. This story–also written in verse–introduces my students to a teen girl from Nepal and the horrors of human trafficking. I added a graphic organizer to this unit with two goals in mind 1) for my students to keep track of the minor characters in the story–especially since my students are unfamiliar with Nepali names and 2) for my students to better recognize the author’s characterization of the protagonist (Lakshmi). As we learned new information about Lakshmi–her situation, her goals, her personality, etc–we would add those facts to the center of the diagram pictured below. As we encountered new characters, we added something to remember them by. For example, next to Ama, we wrote “mom” and next to Bajai Sita, we filled in “store owner.”  Students will often (even unprompted!) refer back to this character list when they come across a name in the story that they cannot remember.

Finally, during fourth quarter we enjoyed the autobiographical graphic novel March (John Lewis).  For this book I created a very simple organizer–really just a spot to jot down two things I wanted students to focus on 1) who was John Lewis and 2) our essential question for the unit. In this book (the first in a trilogy), John Lewis focuses on his childhood and how it led to his involvement in the civil rights movement. I wanted my students to practice reading his anecdotes with an eye towards his purpose. For example, he spends page after page talking about the chickens on his farm. Why? We discuss that the point isn’t that he liked chickens, but the truths he reveals about himself through these shared memories. And so when we read that he baptized his baby chicks and preached to them too, we added “religious and wanted to be a preacher” to the “John Lewis” column in the graphic organizer below.  

We also used this same worksheet to track answers to our essential question, “What drives change?”  I framed the book around this question not only because John Lewis’s goal in the story is to bring about change, but also because the question helps students connect this piece of history to their current lived realities. For example, when we read about the Montgomery bus boycott, we added “boycotts” to our list, but we also reflected on some of the things required for a successful boycott–teamwork, sacrifice, and patience.  Perhaps this will inspire my students to participate in a boycott as a form of civic engagement or maybe instead it will help them recognize that that they can leverage their personal strengths, such as patience, to help fight for a change they see their community needs.

If you’re looking ahead to an upcoming class novel, consider creating a custom graphic organizer for the unit! There are endless options, and whatever you design is bound to help you and your students stay focused on your primary goals for the text over the course of weeks or months of reading the story.