An Introduction to Webbing
A Pre-writing Activity to Discover Connections
In this introductory article, the question is how do bright, advanced or gifted and talented students make sense of issues that probably seem completely unrelated.
Oh, okay. The teacher wants us to write a 500-word essay about the origins of World War Two and how it relates to the decrease of American neutrality. Fine. When was World War Two again? Right. And what exactly does ‘neutrality’ mean? Right. This is going to be a long night…
In the continuing Write Right series of articles, innovative brain-based ideas will be explored that can help bright, advanced or gifted and talented students gain some fresh perspectives by using higher-order thinking skills and abstract thinking on how to write in multiple styles and genres – including expository essays, narratives, creative, poetry, persuasive, literary analysis, cause and effect and many others.
So, how do students make sense of issues that probably seem completely different and unrelated to them? One way to tackle that problem is to talk about graphic organizers and webbing, or web maps, as it is one of the easiest methods available to help students evaluate complex issues.
Students need to understand that our brains are made up of nerves in a web shape and that the dendrites look like little fibers all bunched up in a web. Tell them to think of hundreds of spider’s webs all heaped on top of each other, and yet everything just somehow seems to fit and work together. The basic premise behind webbing is that the information we receive can also manage to fit together somehow; just like how our brains are wired together. It might not make sense how everything connects in our brains, but it always does seem to work with a little effort as the brain is always searching for patterns.
Basic Webbing Techniques
Students can begin to understand webbing by using a large sheet of paper and carrying out a simple webbing exercise. Using a pen, write the word "strawberry" in the middle of the page and draw a square around it, making it the topic word, or the “hub” for the webbing activity. Next, think about words that can associate with ‘strawberry.' This would be a good opportunity for a brainstorming activity where students call out words that they feel have something to do with the topic of strawberries while a recorder writes them all down. After generating a short list of associated words, students will notice that some of the words are similar in categories, like colors or smells or shape words.
The next step is to write the words around the topic word hub on the sheet of paper. To help keep things graphically organized, draw a circle around each of these words. From there, draw lines out from the word strawberry to each of the new words on the chart. This becomes the first ring of the webbing diagram.
Each of the words in the first ring then becomes a topic word hub of its own, and students can repeat the brainstorming activity for each of the words in the first ring followed by a second ring of associated words, making the chart look like a spider’s web itself!
Two Webs Are Better Than One
When bright, advanced or gifted and talented students have grasped the webbing technique, they can move along to a double web to see if they can find some similarities between seemingly unrelated topics. Continuing with the strawberry example, choose another word to web on a new sheet of paper such as ‘breakfast.’ Once the students have repeated the webbing process on second topic hub, compare the first and second rings of the two words strawberries and breakfast, and ask the students to look for words that are present for both topic hubs. Any time there is an exact match, or even if words are pretty close, there becomes a visual connection between the two previously unrelated topic words! Students can then take the matched words and all the words linked to them to use them as key words for their topic sentences for the paper they are about to write. If it will work for strawberries and breakfast, it will also work for World War Two and how it relates to the decrease of American neutrality.
