Anniversary of this blog, on Fridays, I’m resurrecting and updating old posts
that sparked a lot of conversation or that still have a lot to offer people
teaching or writing nonfiction. Today’s essay originally appeared on October
16, 2017.
My
book, Pinocchio Rex and Other Tyrannosaurs, is chock full of text
features.
sketch and sent it to my editor.
face the facts. My drawing skills leave a lot to be desired, but this
sketch was enough the give the talented folks in the HarperCollins art
department an idea of what I had in mind—a grouping of visual elements that
communicate two important ideas:
(1) the tyrannosaur family lived on Earth for 100 million years
(2)
while the group’s final members were gigantic, fearsome predators (like T. rex), the earliest tyrannosaurs
were about the same size as us..
Eventually,
my sad little sketch became this amazing infographic:
To
communicate these important ideas, the infographic summarizes information
presented on many different pages. In other words, the process of
conceptualizing it was similar to the process students engage in as they
analyze and synthesize their research notes while preparing to write a report.
Why
is this an important realization? Because it can help young writers
tremendously. By third grade, children know what plagiarism is. They realize
that they shouldn’t copy their sources, but they struggle to evaluate
the information they’ve collected and make it their own. We need to
offer students a variety of ways to think carefully and critically about
their research notes, and infographics is one tool we can offer them.
Here’s a
terrific infographic created by a boy after he narrowed his topic. At first, he was going to write about robots. Then he decided to focus on robots inspired by animal body designs, and finally he decided to write about one specific kind of robot–snakebots. This infographic shows that he’s already thinking about how he’ll organize his information. He plans to discuss the two different kinds of snakebots (big vs. tiny), what they are capable of, and how they are used to solve human problems.
See how
powerful infographics can be?
When students take the time to represent the ideas
and information they’ve read as infographics (or other combinations of
words and pictures) during their pre-writing process, they’ll find their own
special way of conveying the information. Instead of being tempted to
plagiarize, they’ll write a report that’s 100 percent their own.
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