How to Teach Kids About Cause and Effect in Their Lives

Activity Goals

The goal of this activity is that your child will learn about the relationship between cause and effect, recognize "clue words" that indicate cause and effect, understand that sometimes a cause can also be an effect (and vice versa), and see that these relationships can be found in all aspects of life.

Skills Targeted

The skills this activity targets include:

• Emotional intelligence
• Reading and verbal comprehension ("word clues")
• The ability to understand that the outcomes are determined by prior actions or reactions

Activity to Teach Cause and Effect

1. Begin by reading a story together or doing a science experiment with a clear cause-effect outcome (like the Dancing Raisin Experiment). Then discuss the concept of cause and effect with your child. Ask them if they have ever heard the phrase before and, if so, see if they can explain what it means.
2. Continue your discussion by talking about how events are connected to each other and that the cause is the thing that makes something happen, while the effect is the thing that happens (the reaction).
3. Ask your child to provide you with an example of a cause and effect from the book you read or the experiment you did. Then see if they can provide one from real life as well. Ask: Do things always happen in pairs of cause and effect and then stop? Are there times when something is caused by more than one thing or that the first reaction is the cause of another reaction?
4. Provide a simple example of an event that is a series of cause-effect relationships, either verbally or in pictures. You can sing a song like, “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,” in which each thing the old lady swallows compels her to swallow something else which triggers another reaction and so forth, or you could simply pull up a picture of a Rube Goldberg machine to show how each action of a piece of the machine causes a reaction of another piece.

Recommended Reading

Laura Numeroff’s "If You Give..." series of books (including If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, If You Take a Mouse to School, etc.). Even though each consequence or effect is more ridiculous than the next, these brilliantly illustrated books walk children step-by-step through cause and effect relationships, one sentence at a time.

Cause and Effect Clue Words

Once you and your child have talked about and read stories that deal with cause and effect, your child might have started to notice a pattern of words that indicate cause and effect. Ask them if they can list some of the “clue words” that they can use when they write or look for when they read that indicate cause and effect. For example:

• As a result
• Because
• Consequently
• Due to
• Nevertheless
• Since
• So
• The reason that/the reason for
• Therefore
• Thus

Extend the Learning

Now that they know some clue words, ask your child to use some of these clue words to write a paragraph describing a cause and effect event that happened in their own life.