Cause and Effect Knowledge: Designing Tasks That Help Children Think Part 6
Cause and effect tasks help children think beyond what happened — and start asking why. Here’s how we can design tasks for that kind of thinking.
📚 Catch Up on the Series
Missed a part? Here’s what we’ve covered so far:
📦 Part 1: Organising Knowledge
Why organising knowledge makes learning stick — and how it helps shape what children remember.
🧱 Part 2: Selecting Task Types
Choosing the right structure to match the thinking: Compare, Sequence, Cause & Effect, Chunk.
Six powerful task examples that group ideas into meaningful mental ‘buckets’.
🏅 Part 4: Ranking and Comparing Knowledge
From Diamond 9s to Target Maps — helping children weigh, prioritise, and reason.
🔁 Part 5: Sequencing Knowledge
From timelines to swim lanes — helping children structure ideas, actions, and events so they flow and make sense
⚙️ Part 6: Cause and Effect Knowledge
From fishbone diagrams to consequence maps — helping children understand why things happen and what they lead to.
💡 The Big Idea
Sequencing helps pupils understand what happened — but cause and effect helps them understand why it happened.
Cause and effect tasks push pupils beyond ordering events. They encourage reasoning, explanation, and connection. Whether it’s identifying the reason behind a character’s actions, analysing the impact of human activity on the environment, or predicting the consequences of a decision, cause and effect structures build more than memory — they build understanding.
👀 A Closer Look
Cause and effect thinking helps children move from What happened? to What caused it? and What did it lead to? It supports:
🧠 Explanation – articulating reasons and results
🔁 Prediction – anticipating what might happen next
📚 Connection – linking ideas across subjects and systems
Let’s explore six practical tasks that help pupils organise and apply causal reasoning.
🐟 Example Task 1: Fishbone Diagram
Children explore multiple causes leading to a single outcome. Each ‘bone’ on the diagram represents a category (e.g. social, environmental), with individual reasons branching off.
✏️ Used for: Analysing layered causes, grouping reasons
🔎 Why it works: It helps children organise complexity and visualise how many small causes can contribute to one large event. Grouping reduces overload and reveals patterns.
🔄 Example Task 2: Relations Diagram
Pupils explore how causes, actions, or objects influence each other in a web of connections. Arrows show how ideas branch out and feed into one another.
✏️ Used for: Mapping systems, exploring interdependence
🔎 Why it works: Some causes trigger several effects — and some effects have more than one cause. This task builds systems thinking and supports deeper understanding of indirect consequences.
📈 Example Task 3: Rise and Fall Graph
Pupils track how a concept or character changes over time — such as mood, power, or success — and explain the causes behind each rise or fall.
✏️ Used for: Visualising consequence, linking change to cause
🔎 Why it works: This graph connects abstract change (like feeling hopeful or becoming influential) to specific events. It strengthens reasoning while reinforcing data representation skills.
⚙️ Example Task 4: Function Machine
Children input an idea, apply a rule or cause (e.g. “more sunlight”), and analyse the output across different objects or scenarios. It’s brilliant for exploring patterns and predictions.
✏️ Used for: Identifying consistent cause/effect relationships
🔎 Why it works: This makes reasoning visible. It supports logical thinking, rule-building, and prediction — across subjects like maths, science, or even character behaviour.
👧 Practical FS/KS1 Examples
Cause and effect isn’t reserved for Primary. In Early Years, it’s about helping children notice actions and outcomes, make predictions, and understand how one thing can lead to another.
🛝Example Task 5: Block and Ramp Play
In the construction area, offer balls, blocks, tubes, and ramps. As children build, support them in observing and talking about what their actions cause: a ball rolls down, knocks something over, or changes direction.
💬 Scaffold thinking with:
“What made the ball roll faster?”
“Can you change it so it rolls slower next time?”
“What would happen if we added another block here?”
🔎 Supports:
Physical Development – Gross Motor Skills (ELG)
Understanding the World – Forces and Energy
Creating and Thinking Critically (COEL)
🧠 Rather than presenting cause and effect as a fixed task, this approach uses curiosity and movement to surface thinking around consequence, design, and improvement.
🎨 Example Task 8: Exploring Paint Effects (Creative Area – Continuous Provision)
In the creative area, provide a range of tools for applying liquid paint, such as pipettes, cotton buds, sponges, brushes, sticks, or droppers. Allow children to freely explore how the paint behaves when applied with different tools.
💬 Prompt discussion with questions like:
“What happened when you used the pipette?”
“Why do you think the paint splashed or dripped here?”
“How is this tool making the paint move differently?”
🔎 Supports:
Expressive Arts and Design – Creating with Materials (ELG)
Communication and Language – Speaking (ELG)
Creating and Thinking Critically (COEL)
🧠 This open-ended task lets children experience real-time cause and effect as they manipulate materials. By varying their technique, they observe how pressure, movement, and tool choice impact the paint’s behaviour — leading to conversations about decision-making, prediction, and visual outcomes.
🧭 Wrapping It Up
Cause and effect tasks help pupils go beyond “what happened” to explore why things happen and what they lead to.
They develop reasoning by linking actions to outcomes — building more structured, transferable thinking.
Visual structures like fishbone diagrams, input/output tables, and consequence maps give children clear tools to organise cause-effect chains.
These tasks encourage explanation, prediction, and deeper understanding of systems and stories.
By mapping how one thing leads to another, pupils build more flexible, interconnected schema that support long-term understanding.
📥 Download the Free Task Toolkit Packs
Want to use these examples in your classroom or share them with your team?
I’ve created a FREE Task Design Toolkit, including:
✅ 6 task examples in each pack
✅ Practical ideas for making each task active and embodied
✅ Extension and scaffolding suggestions for all learners
🚀 What’s Next?
In Part 7, we’ll take a step back and explore how to combine task types over a unit or sequence of learning. We’ll look at how to build schema gradually, using chunking, sequencing, comparison and causal reasoning across a full teaching sequence.
📚 Sources & Inspiration
This post draws on the brilliant work of educators, researchers, and generous online communities. While the tasks and examples have been adapted and developed for the primary classroom, many of the underlying ideas are grounded in the work of the following individuals and groups:
🧠 Books & Research
David Goodwin & Oliver Caviglioli – Organise Ideas: Thinking by Hand, Extending the Mind
🌐 Online Educators & Threads
James Fitzpatrick (@mrfitzhist) – for insightful history task design and questioning
Karl McGrath (@MRMICT) – for ideas around task design and retrieval challenges
Oliver Caviglioli (@olicav) – for dual coding and visual explanation frameworks
💬 Communities
Primary Task Design Facebook Group (led by @MRMICT) — a highly active space where educators generously share practical task structures and thinking routines
📝 More from WAGOLL Teaching
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Exploring Success Criteria - Make Them Dynamic and Accessible ➡️ By presenting success criteria in a more dynamic and relevant medium, meaning can be made, and links can be made to prior learning. Success criteria need to be made domain, subject, and age group specific.
Retrieval Practice: 7 Activities That Work in Primary ➡️ A handy list of retrieval activities for Primary children
In a bit,
Coops 😎