12 Cause and Effect Activities for the K-12 Classroom

Have you ever noticed that your students may grasp a concept before they can name it? They may understand that if they rock on their chairs in class, they could fall over. Or if they sharpen their pencils, it may be easier (and cleaner!) to write.

From reward systems like “finish your dinner and you can have dessert” to deterrents like “if you touch the stove, it could hurt,” students are aware of cause-and-effect relationships before they can put a name to them. These relationships are a fundamental part of everyday life, making them common themes in both fictional and informational texts.

Today, we’re exploring how to apply definitions to concepts students already understand, and providing five cause-and-effect activities you can use in your classroom to help them identify, analyze, and apply these relationships to make meaning from texts.

• What is a cause-and-effect relationship?
• Why teach cause and effect in the classroom?
• 5 ways to teach students about cause-and-effect relationships
• How can I reinforce cause and effect for older students?
• Can I assess my students on cause-and-effect relationships?

[What is a cause-and-effect relationship?](id-what)

To help students identify cause and effect, it’s helpful to give them a definition of the relationship. This can make the concept feel more concrete and easier to understand. 

Cause and effect is the relationship between two or more events where one event makes the other happen. Another way to explain cause and effect is that actions have consequences. For example, if you eat too much ice cream, you may get a stomachache. The action or cause is eating too much ice cream. The consequence or effect is getting a stomachache.

Cause and effect is also a type of text structure authors use to create articles, stories, and other content. It can appear in both fiction and nonfiction texts. Learning to identify cause-and-effect relationships can help students better understand this text structure and discover the connections among elements within a text. 

Are cause-and-effect relationships always simple?

While we often give simple examples of cause-and-effect relationships in class, in the real world, they can be much more nuanced as students start to look for and analyze them in texts. Here are some trickier cause-and-effect situations to discuss with your students:

• Chronology vs. Sentence structure: While causes always happen first in time, they don’t always appear first in a written sentence. Explicitly tell students that the effect might appear first in a sentence, but the cause always happens first chronologically.
• Chains of events: An effect can become a cause for another event, creating a chain of cause-and-effect relationships. Use visuals, like falling dominoes, to show how one event can affect the next. For example: The cooling unit at the ice rink broke (cause) → so the ice melted (effect + new cause) → so the hockey game was canceled (effect).
• Multiple causes and effects: Real-world situations often have multiple causes that lead to one effect, or one cause that leads to multiple effects. Challenge students to think beyond 1-1 relationships by asking questions like “What else could have contributed?” or “What other things happened because of this?”

[Why teach cause and effect in the classroom?](id-why)

Because understanding cause and effect isn’t just an ELA skill, there are also other ways to teach it in any classroom that benefit your students. These perks include:

Enhanced reading comprehension

Students need to understand the connection between causes and effects to help them make meaning from what they read. It helps them:

• Follow an author’s logic.
• Understand the plot and character motivations in fiction.
• Make predictions and inferences about what will happen next, even when it’s not explicitly stated.

To build reading comprehension while teaching cause and effect, pause after reading a passage or paragraph to review the key points. Ask students questions like “What do you think will happen next, and why?” or “What might have caused the character to feel this way?”

Strengthened critical thinking and problem-solving skills

Cause and effect thinking helps students develop their cognitive abilities by:

• Promoting logic and reason: Understanding the probability of outcomes and recognizing logical patterns helps students think critically. Students as young as 6-8 years old have the ability to build these skills and see how their actions affect others.
• Encouraging analysis and evaluation: Recognizing these relationships can help students break down situations, identify patterns, and evaluate scenarios.
• Influencing informed decision-making: Learning about cause and effect can help students recognize how their actions lead to consequences and encourage them to make choices with better outcomes.

To build critical thinking with these relationships, try using classroom challenges or historical events and analyzing them. Ask students to brainstorm potential causes of a problem or evaluate the effects of different solutions.

Improved writing skills

Applying cause and effect helps students organize and structure their writing logically. Using cause-and-effect relationships correctly can help make writing clearer and more persuasive. The structure is also fundamental for inclusion in various texts, such as essays, stories, and even scientific reports. 

When students are writing, encourage them to use cause-and-effect signal words to connect their ideas. You can provide sentence frames like “Because of X, Y happened, which led to Z.”

[5 ways to teach students about cause-and-effect relationships](id-tips)

Explore these five ways you can structure your lessons to help teach students about cause-and-effect relationships in a text:

1. Start with clear definitions and visuals

Make sure students understand the definition of cause and effect by using visuals like anchor charts or graphic organizers that can make the concept easier to understand, and that they can reference if they have questions.

Create an anchor chart together that lists the definition of a cause, an example, and an image that illustrates the example on one half of the chart, and the same information for an effect on the other.

After it’s completed, display your anchor chart in the classroom and allow students to reference it in future lessons and activities.

While reading and practicing cause-and-effect identification and analysis, make sure you have graphic organizers like T-charts or flowcharts available. These can help younger students and visual learners organize sequences of events to understand their relationships better.

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Download your printable: Newsela's Cause and Effect Worksheet

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2. Teach cause-and-effect signal words

Certain words signal cause-and-effect relationships in a text. Teach students to look for these words to help them more easily identify these relationships while reading. Some of the signal words include:

• If
• Then
• Because
• So
• Since
• Due to
• As a result of
• Therefore

After students learn about signal words, have them find and dissect cause-and-effect sentences in a text. This activity shows students that the cause won’t always come first in a sentence, even if the action always happens first in the pair. 

This activity also helps students recognize that signal words can appear at the beginning or in the middle of a sentence, depending on the sentence's construction. Model how to underline the signal word and then highlight the cause in one color and the effect in another.

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Newsela Knack: You can use Newsela ELA's annotation feature while modeling this strategy and when students read independently. Assign one color to highlight signal words, one for causes, and one for effects.

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3. Do hands-on demonstrations

To make a literacy skill stick, sometimes you have to take it off the page. Show students how cause and effect work in real life with in-class demonstrations. Depending on the texts or stories you're reading in class, you may use experiments pulled right from your lesson content. You can also try simple experiments like:

• Turning the classroom lights on and off
• Popping a balloon
• Rolling a toy car down a ramp
• Setting up a row of dominoes and knocking them over
• Mixing baking soda and vinegar

After each demonstration, pause and ask students, “What caused this?” or “What happened because of this?” These questions help cement the cause-and-effect language and connect the physical actions to the vocabulary words.

4. Try word-based games and activities

Learning about cause and effect can be more fun when students are actively engaged in the process themselves. Try word-based games and activities to encourage them to think about cause-and-effect relationships. You can try:

• Cause-and-effect brainstorms: Provide a list of age-appropriate causes and have students brainstorm possible effects. Discuss the most likely, most entertaining, and most creative answers and ask students to justify their reasoning for each effect.
• Sentence matching games: On slips of paper, take sentences that show cause-and-effect relationships and split them up before or after the signal words. Students can move around the room to find a classmate with a matching sentence fragment to make a pair.
• Mad Libs: Use Mad Libs to challenge students to practice parts of speech and grammar. Choose stories with cause and effect relationships, and when you read the completed piece back to students, ask them to pick out the causes and effects and if they’re plausible in real life or not.
• Caption creation: Find images that show both sides of a cause-and-effect relationship and put them side by side. Then, prompt students to write a caption for each picture.

5. Use real-life scenarios for predictions

Use images that show one side of a cause-and-effect relationship to get students thinking about the other. If you show students a picture of flowers in bloom, you could ask: "What do you think happened to make the flowers grow?" Students can share their potential causes, with answers like, "It rained and the seeds sprouted."

You can also do this activity the opposite way. For example, you could show students a picture of a basketball player taking a jump shot. You could then ask them, "What do you think happens next?" They may answer something like, "I think they'll make a basket," or "I think the player misses."

The goal of this activity isn't to get the "right" answer. It's designed to get students thinking about the potential causes and effects of one scenario.

Beyond hypothetical games, many advertisements show cause and effect to help sell their products. Bring media analysis into your cause-and-effect lessons and have students determine how products solve problems. For example, you could use the "Finding Dory" Coppertone ad from 2016 to show what happens when you do (or don't) use sunscreen.

You may ask students questions like, "What problem does sunscreen solve?" They could respond with, "It stops your skin from getting red," or "It stops sunburn."

6. Pick specific mentor texts

Choose texts with explicit cause-and-effect relationships or structures to help students identify them. You can use books like "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" by Laura Numeroff or "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" by Judith Viorst. Other options include nursery rhymes, which usually have clear examples of cause-and-effect relationships.

While reading or watching an animated or acted-out version of the story, ask students to call out or write down major events in the plot. After the story is over, discuss the causes of these events.

[How can I reinforce cause and effect for older students?](id-older)

For older students who have already mastered the basics of understanding cause and effect, you can still include activities in your lessons that reinforce the concepts at an age-appropriate level. Try activities like:

• Charades: Put cause-and-effect scenarios on slips of paper and ask students to act them out without speaking. The classmates have to identify what the cause and effect are from the pantomime.
• Inference photos: Use news photos or historical images and ask students to infer the cause or effect based on their knowledge of the event and cause-and-effect relationships.
• Reasoning analysis: Ask students to evaluate texts for how an author builds an argument using cause and effect, or explain unintended consequences of a character’s choices.
• Causation fallacy: Teach students to distinguish between associations and causation. Stress that a correlation doesn’t always point to a cause, especially when analyzing data. Have them label claims as either a correlation or a cause and justify their choice.
• Ask “how”: Move beyond identifying cause and effect to explaining how a cause produces an effect. This can be especially useful in science classes where students learn to explain phenomena. 
• Rewrite the facts: Introduce “what if” thinking about established scientific principles or historical events. Ask questions like, “If the colonists hadn’t protested the Stamp Act, what might have happened?”
• Map the consequences: Use real-world situations to map intended and unintended consequences of actions. For example, students may list positive, negative, and unforeseen effects of a new school dress code policy.

[Can I assess my students on cause-and-effect relationships?](id-assess)

There are multiple ways to evaluate your students’ knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships at the surface level and for deeper understanding. You can try assessment methods like:

• Identification tasks: Ask students to identify causes and effects in a paragraph or short text passage.
• Creation tasks: Ask students to write their own cause-and-effect sentences or paragraphs. Provide prompts for additional support.
• Exit tickets: Use quick checks like, “Because [CAUSE], [EFFECT] happened” at the end of a lesson.
• Observations and discussions: Watch and listen to how students explain character decisions, scientific experiments, or historical outcomes in whole-class discussions, and small-group or partner work.
• Traditional assessments: Use multiple-choice quizzes or task cards to check progress and provide targeted practice.
• Writing practice: Encourage students to write explanations that explain why something happened, compare competing causes, or explain and explore chains of events.

Teaching cause and effect with Newsela

With Newsela ELA, you can teach students about cause-and-effect relationships in text using relevant, real-world content. Plus, it's easy to check students' progress to discover if they're learning and can use this skill independently.

Our standards-aligned multiple-choice quizzes make it easy to get the right data to adjust your lessons in real-time. Research shows that students who read and take quizzes on Newsela ELA twice weekly see about three additional months of growth in literacy skills.

Not a Newsela customer yet? Sign up for Newsela Lite to start your 45-day free trial of our premium subject products and get access to the scaffolds you need to teach cause and effect in your classroom.