Cause and Effect Lessons for Elementary Grades, K-5

By Bennett Steidinger | September 16, 2025

This blog is a must-read if you’re teaching cause and effect in elementary. Includes links to free cause and effect lesson plans!

Cause and effect relationships show up in literature, science experiments, when acknowledging how historical events have led us to present day circumstances, mathematical equations, etc. Understanding these relationships begins early on in school and is found in common core standards throughout elementary grades. A third grade ELA Common Core Standard for Literacy identifies that students must be able to “describe the logical connection between particular sentences and paragraphs in a text [e.g. cause/effect]”, specifically mentioning understanding cause and effect connections as a skill for students to master. 

Linked below are six cause and effect lesson plans and activities to teach students of a wide range of ages. They use a variety of K-5 literary strategies in fun and creative ways – download the activities now!

Lessons for Teaching Cause and Effect

1. Lessons from the Lorax 

With the elementary activity Lessons from the Lorax, you’ll start off reading the book The Lorax by Dr. Seuss as a class. Throughout the story or once the story has been read, fill in the provided cause and effect graphic organizer as a whole group, in pairs, or as individual practice. The cause column in the graphic organizer is pre-filled for students to practice identifying the effects that follow. 

You can follow up this graphic organizer activity with a board game in part 2 where students work together to collect resources to replant the trees cut down in the book.

An overhead shot of students playing Lessons from the Lorax, with the gameboard, playing cards, and resource banks visible.

2. Why Do You Cry?: Not a Sob Story 

This 2nd grade cause and effect lesson also starts with reading a book as a class, Why Do You Cry?: Not a Sob Story by Kate Klise, and filling out a graphic organizer. This time, the paired graphic organizer has all the effects filled out and the cause side is left blank for students to fill in. The worksheet is scaffolded, providing specific effects for the teacher to fill in during direct teaching, what to fill in during guided practice, and then a separate worksheet for students to independently work on filling in the remaining effects.

This lesson is found on ReadWorks which has a lot of other cause and effect lessons paired with books and other readings for all elementary grade levels.

3. More or Less  

In the lesson More or Less, students visually depict cause and effect relationships by building a word web connected by arrows. Students are provided with a stack of cards that say “more,” a stack that say “less,” and a third stack of cards with various nouns in a word bank. Starting with the card combination “more people,” they build out the web to show the relationship between the growing population and the cards in the word bank. For example, students might draw an arrow from the initial combination of words to a set that says “less trees” or “more friendship” to show the causal relationship between the word sets. Students can draw arrows from the second set of words to a third set and so on, creating a web of cause-and-effect relationships initiating from the statement that there are more people on Earth.

This ELA cause and effect lesson provides printable word cards, each accompanied by pictures. You can also change the words to use vocabulary that students are currently studying.

A student makes cause-and-effect connections on a white board using printable More or Less cards.

4. Signal word games

Signal words are words that signal to the students that a cause or an effect event will follow, or words that will connect both a cause and effect. There are many ways you can help students explore and use signal words.  

Start with an anchor chart of signal words and use different activities to interact with this anchor chart.

  • Challenge students to come up with their own cause and effect sentences using these signal words. A prompt can be given based on a current event or a book you are reading as a class.
  • If students are in the beginning of understanding cause and effect relationships, provide the class with sentences in which they must identify signal words. Students then are exposed to the way in which signal words are used in a sentence and can grow to build their own using signal words. 

5. Domino Cause and Effect activity

This easy domino experiment uses a domino train to explore cause and effect in a variety of ways. At a basic level, demonstrate to students that when the first domino is tipped over (the cause), the rest will follow (the effect). If a domino or two are removed from the middle, the effect is that the remainder of the domino train will not fall. The activity details that students at higher grade levels can use a yard or meter stick to set up the dominoes at a set distance from one another and consider what effect changing the distance between the dominoes has on the speed at which the dominoes fall. Or, if it impacts whether or not all the dominoes fall at all.

6. Web of Life

In the elementary ELA lesson Web of Life, the teacher reads a story about creatures all living together in a habitat and how they’re all interconnected. Fourteen students are assigned a character [worm, flower, bird, fox, people etc.] in the provided story, which the teacher will read aloud. There is a ball of yarn that starts with the first character in the story and is passed from character to character as they appear in the text, forming a web of connection between the creatures. By having one character pull on the piece of yarn they are holding, students can see (and feel) the physical connection between the characters. Discussion questions are provided to analyze what might happen to others if something were to happen to one character. This provides a real-life example of how one action can affect the greater habitat. 

Students in a circle hold connecting yarn as they go through the activity Web of Life to learn about cause and effect within a habitat.

College students play Web of Life in a pre-service workshop for future elementary teachers.

Bonus Cause and Effect Lessons: For teaching cause and effect at a higher level, Population Education has two climate change lessons for understanding the cause-and-effect chains involved in Earth’s changing climate. People and Climate Change: The Data Is In and Methane Matters both have students making causal connections between events using data and evidence provided in the lesson. 

For additional practice, use one of these free cause and effect worksheets for students to identify cause and effect, and build their own sentences from given scenarios. 

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