The Foldables strategy allows students to organize information from a reading. Depending upon the topic and lesson objectives, the strategy can be used while students read to define vocabulary, track cause and effect, track evidence that supports a claim, and/or to compare and contrast ideas, events, or people.
Procedure
1
Provide students with a pre-made Foldables graphic organizer or sheet of paper and the guidelines (how many sections and the headers) they should use to create their own folding graphic organizer.
Consider creating a visual model of the organizer to show students, or create the organizer alongside students to demonstrate the necessary steps of creation.
2
Provide time for students to read the assigned text in the manner most appropriate for the classroom.
3
Invite students to record details from the text that align to the headers and objectives of the lesson.
Differentiation
Chunk the Text: To support students in reading and comprehending a longer or more complex text, provide stopping points and ask students to jot down details after each one. This allows students to stop and process information in segments.
Alternative Titles/Headings/Prompts: For an extra level of challenge, consider providing alternative titles and headings or prompts to encourage students to think about more complex ideas in the text. For example, in a lesson comparing Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, you could ask students to focus on life experiences that may have shaped these men’s beliefs in addition to listing their beliefs and strategies.
Multilingual Learning Support
Beginning Proficiency: Provide bilingual labels and visual symbols for each section header. Model the folding process step-by-step with clear visuals and gestures. The organizer sections can include picture supports and word banks in both English and students’ home language. Encourage students to use a combination of drawings, symbols, and words from both languages to record information. Use color-coding to help students match information to the appropriate sections, and provide simple sentence frames (e.g., “This goes here because…,” “I found…”) to help students explain their organizing choices.
Intermediate Proficiency: Support more complex information organization while building students’ academic vocabulary by including preprinted academic language frames specific to the organizing task on the foldable (e.g., comparing/contrasting, cause/effect). Provide structured note-taking guides within each section to help students record key information using content-specific vocabulary. During partner sharing, students can use sentence frames (e.g., “I organized this information here because…”, “This evidence connects to…”) to explain their thinking. Include mini glossaries relevant to each section on the back of the foldable.
Advanced Proficiency: Emphasize the sophisticated organization and analysis of information by having students create multilayered foldables that show relationships between concepts and include spaces for analysis and synthesis. The organizer can include prompts for making cross-text connections and evaluating the significance of information. Support students in using academic language to explain their organizational choices and make connections between different sections of their foldable. Encourage the use of discipline-specific vocabulary and complex sentence structures to articulate relationships between ideas.
Variations
Notebook Organizers: Instead of providing separate pieces of paper, invite students to create an organizer in their notebook. This may entail folding a page in half lengthwise, adding sticky notes to a page, or otherwise modifying the notebook page to track the information in a visually engaging manner.
Jigsaw Organizers: Invite students to focus on recording information for only one of the organizer sections. After reading and recording, students meet in mixed groups to share the information that they recorded for their assigned section.
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