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Fact or Opinion Good readers need to be able to sort out the authors' opinion from real facts. Help your child practice figuring out the difference between facts and opinions. Which statements are facts and which are opinions? • Sleeping in a tent is the best part of camping. • If the President dies in office, the Vice President becomes the President. • County music is the best kind of music. • There are stars and stripes on the American flag. The Five Whys This strategy is simply a process of asking "Why?" four or five times in a row to discover the meaning of a particular problem or situation. This helps children to think through a story or text. Graphic organizers such as the "five whys activity" allow students to trace cause and effect through- out an incident and to get to the root cause of a problem. Example: Problem Statement: You are on your way home from school and the car you are traveling in stops in the middle of the road. 1. Why did your car stop? Because it ran out of gas. 2. Why did it run out of gas? Because I didn't buy any gas on the way to school. 3. Why didn't you buy any gas this morning? Because I didn't have any money. 4. Why didn't you have any money? Because I left my wallet at home. 5. Why did you leave your wallet at home? Because the family was running late. Lesson: If you don't ask the right questions, you don't get the right answers. Graphic Organizers A graphic organizer is usually a one-page form with blank areas for the student to fill in with related ideas and information. Some organizers are very specific; others can be used with many topics. For the most part, the information on a graphic organizer could just as easily be filled in on a form or written as a list. The organizer gives the child another way to "see" the information. Some of the organizers allow for the information to be written or drawn, opening the activity up to younger grades.