Literacy Skill: Annotation

I noticed that some of the baseline assessments had instructions that asked students to annotate the text. And yet, we also told them not to write on the test! Well, this is a contradiction, isn’t it? As good readers ourselves, we know that annotating a text is an important way to be active readers.

But do we give our students opportunities to annotate texts? One way to make annotation possible when students don’t have their own books is to give students photocopies of articles or short stories or poems or sections of texts that we want them to read closely.

And do we teach our students how to annotate? Check out these links for some great resources on teaching annotation skills! And please feel free to post in a comment below some great resources YOU may have on annotation skills that you would like to share!

Thinking Notes (video)
Purposeful Annotation: A “Close Reading” Strategy that Makes Sense to My Students (blog post)
I'll Have Mine Annotated, Please (article)
Beyond the Yellow Highlighter (article)
Teaching Student Annotation (lesson plan)
Back to School with Annotation: 10 Ways to Annotate with Students (online article)
Annotation Rubric (borrowed from apsaunders.wikispaces.com)

Try this experiment in the next week: Give your students in one class a text of any kind and ask them to annotate it. See what they do. Give your students in another class the same text and teach them a strategy for annotating the text and see what they do. Let me know how it goes!