Ask students to underline or highlight cause and effect in their reading. Students can use one color to underline or highlight causes and a different color for the effects. Underlining and highlighting are activities that can be done independently and quickly, while providing reference. Students can read stories on their own, then turn in the underlined material or go over it in class. This works particularly well with reading packets that are not reusable.
Graphic organizers give students the opportunity to visualize the relationship. There are various ways to organize the information. Students can draw side-by-side squares and write an event from the reading in each one. For example, if the reading was about a child who "felt sad" after a "death in the family," one event -- "death in the family" -- would go in the first box and the other event -- "felt sad" -- would go in the second box. The relationship would then need to be determined. Students can label one box "cause" and the other "effect," and draw an arrow between the boxes indicating the direction of the relationship.
Engage students in active listening and learning. Read a story as a class and ask students questions about the events. Ask students to state events they remember from the reading, then ask "Why did that happen?" or "What did it cause?" Encourage students to work backward or forward through events to identify how cause and effect is often a chain of events throughout the story.
Help students become familiar with words that signal a cause-and-effect relationship. Examples of such words include because, afterward, as a result and but. Students can identify these words by circling them in the reading, writing them on the board, raising their hands when they hear one or circling them in sentences on a worksheet.