Things to annotate while reading how to#
Things to annotate while reading professional#

In that case, the purpose I set for my students’ reading is, as The Gallagher put it in a recent post’s comments section, to simply become smarter about the world, and the post-reading task is that they need to write a thoughtful 1+ page response.

Things to annotate while reading professional#

Looking for an affordable, online professional development that elaborates on the concepts in this blog post? Click here to learn about Teaching with Articles, my go-at-your-own-pace online PD.Īs an example, let’s say I’m helping my students think through the task of purposefully annotating a Kelly Gallagher-esque article of the week. Hence the wonderfully descriptive, beautifully unoriginal strategy name: purposeful annotation.

When my students have a text they can write on, the idea, then, is to annotate in a way that supports our purpose for reading and the parameters of our post-reading task (keep in mind that the purpose and the task should line up). what we're going to do with the reading after we're done.why we're doing the reading in the first place and.The big idea is this: what we do when reading should align with Purposeful annotation: here's what I’m talking about So to help my kids get after it and dominate some life, I've simply taken to a “strategy” that I call purposeful annotation.

Things to annotate while reading how to#

We still need to teach kids, across the disciplines, how to wrestle with assigned texts, seeking, like Jacob, to get whatever blessing they have to bestow. So when I call close reading a buzzword or write the term’s obituary, I don’t want to give you the impression that we should let ourselves cynically dismiss the idea that reading is often hard, analytical - and yes, even “close” - work, especially when we're dealing with complex, college- or career-level texts assigned by a teacher.

If you’re new to the blog, though, keep in mind that while I do try not to take the educational establishment too terribly seriously (instead opting to occasionally poke fun at us), when it comes to helping students flourish in the long-term, I’m dead serious. I blame my error on allowing myself to get sucked into the unfortunate vortex that was the buzzwordification of close reading. It took me a year or more to realize that I was saying one buzzwordy thing to mean a lot of explicit, less confusing things that readers do when grappling with a text. If you look at my original close reading post, you'll see I was basically using the phrase “close reading” to refer to annotation. Now that my own children are reading higher level texts in high school, I can see the importance of annotaing literature efficiently.Mmm… tortilla chip crumbs. Rather than giving a blanket direction “to mark important things,” offering a prepared list helps students build this essential reading skill. Because these types of sections in the story were marked, students created much more thoughtful essays when they later analyzed a theme from the novel ( CLICK HERE to read about the theme activity).īy providing lists for shorter reading selections and then scaffolding students to build personal lists with longer texts, the learners will begin to identify essential ideas in literature independently. We immediately added that to our list and started notating scenes and quotes where Billy shows emotion. In Where the Red Fern Grows, students comment early on about how often Billy cries. Start tracking those items as the reading continues. For example, in The Giver, students begin to recognize references to pale eyes or the use of capitalization for things that are typically common nouns. Read a few chapters with the group and then begin keeping a list of ideas the students believe are important. For longer texts such as a novel unit, do not pre-print a list.I am not sure about your classroom, but my students have pencil cases overflowing with colorful pen options, so they actually like this task. Use a variety of eye catching symbols and colors. Underline a quote with a specific symbol in it. When students mark the text, use different types of marks.Then, as a whole group, in reading circles, in pairs… students review the list while re-reading the story a second time and annotate key features and quotes. If a short story is only 1-2 pages, we read through the story one time without stopping, analyzing, or interrupting.( CLICK HERE to see my short story resources that include these lists). Other items might be weather, a special object a main character has, or a detail related to the setting.

And finally, students are on the lookout for one important word or idea. They might look for a specific figure of speech that is emphasized in the story– often similes. Focus ideas I typically ask students to find are descriptions of the main character.

With brief reading assignments like a short story, create and pre-print the list for the students prior to reading.