Cause And Effect Graphic Organizers: What Is Cause And Effect And How Do You Use It?

If you want to get right to the free cause and effect graphic organizers, click here.

However, if you would like more information about:

What is cause and effect?

Why is cause and effect important?

How is cause and effect used?

then please read the rest of this article.

What is Cause and Effect?

An explanation of cause and effect can be as simple or as complicated as you would like to make it. For the purposes of this article and web site, I'm going to go with simple. The free cause and effect graphic organizers available on this web site will be anywhere from simple to complicated. So if you are looking for something a little more in depth, the organizers will supply that for you.

Cause: An event that makes something else happen.

Effect: The result of the cause. The effect happens after the cause.

Here are some examples.

Cause	Effect
Kelly eats a lot of candy	Kelly has cavities at every checkup
Joel volunteers at the homeless shelter 20 hours a week	Joel received the "Volunteer of the Year" award!
My family was late getting to the airport.	Our seats we reassigned and we had to take a later flight
The Miller's built their new house is a flood zone.	The Miller's homeowners insurance is three times higher than it was in their old house.
Lauren worked every summer she was in college.	Lauren graduated with no student loans.

Why is Cause and Effect Important?

Consistently looking for cause and effect relationships helps develop analytical and critical thinking skills like problem solving, decision making (VERY important!!) classifying, comparing and sequencing. Effective study and use of cause and effect will helps kids do better in school as well as in real life because of the development of critical thinking skills.

Many people find that good use of cause and effect helps to focus on reality and not fantasy land or false assumptions. It also helps to drill down to important points.

For example, let's take the Boston Tea Party and think about it.

To prove how easy it is to do this, I'm going to tell you that I totally made up the cause and effect graphic organizers myself...you could call it a customized cause effect graphic organizer. Anyone can do this!!

Can you see how:

using cause and effect graphic organizers can really help you dig into the information to make it easy to understand and easy to remember?

this makes you THINK about the subject, not just skim through it?

it makes you think about the information and not take anything at face value?

How is Cause and Effect Used?

There is literally a plethora of ways that cause and effect can be used. Here are some:

Improve writing skills

Develop reading comprehension

Problem solving

Decision making

Analysis

There are several uses for cause and effect so I want to give you some free organizers and examples to help you with cause and effect analysis. Below are links to free cause and effect graphic organizers. Each organizer has an example with it to help you get started.