Sometimes I’ll assign a second read for homework. Now that they aren’t trying to figure out what’s happening next, what do they notice? The first time you read the short story you are looking for the basic information: what do you notice? What words stick out to you? What seems to be important?īut after you’ve had time to go through one time, students read the entire story a second time. ![]() This is a method I like to use with short stories, especially really short stories that can be read twice in a period. We also want to look at individual words, phrases, and sentences to see how they contribute to the whole. We don’t just look at the whole thing when we annotate. Working through a poem this way not only gives students manageable chunks of information to process, but also helps model the type of close examination that annotation requires. You’ll ask the same basic questions: what do you notice? What words stick out to you? What seems to be important? But as you add each piece, ask another question: how does this piece either build on or contradict what’s come before? Then you work through the poem as a class piece by piece, annotating as you go. Put each chunk on a slide, or go old school and create a flip book on paper if you wish. I like to use poems that have easy breaks to work with, such as “To A Daughter Leaving Home” (there are breaks after commas at the end of lines) or “The Summer I Was Sixteen” ( which has four quatrains.) Take an easy poem and only give students a small piece at a time to work with in increments. If any of you have a strategy for making this work, I’d love to hear it.) Chunk it.Īnnotating an entire story or chapter can be an overwhelming process, and it’s helpful to break a passage into manageable chunks to help students practice with fewer sentences and words. For one thing, I’m too nervous to do it with something I’ve very read, and not a good enough actor to pretend I’m reading something I’m familiar with for the first time. (A confession: I know a lot of teachers have good success with a read aloud, but I’ve never done this. ![]() Have them point out how your reading of the story isn’t accurate. If you get real ambitious, annotate a story improperly. You can have students add their own annotations along with yours, to fill in the “blank spaces” (you could even annotate parts of the story, and leaves some large chunks for them to annotate following your methods.) You can also have them take all of your annotations and classify them according to what annotation “moves” you’re making – predictions, questions, and so on. There are other things you can add more complexity to this task. But then occurred to me that since this was the first story we were going to read, why don’t I just hand them this copy to model what good annotation looks like? Unfortunately the only copy I could locate was one I had already annotated for the purposes of teaching it. I was looking for a clean copy of “ The Kiss,” a story that we read in class. I remind them that annotators look for answers to the following questions: what do you notice? What words stick out to you? What seems to be important? And then we do one or more of the following strategies. I need a good strategy to kick it off before I expect them to do it for homework, or before they tackle something longer like a novel.īelow are a few of the first things I do when we talk annotation in class. Or maybe a there’s a selection of students I suspect has coasted through school without having annotated anything. Maybe I have new students who need a refresher on annotation. We can enjoy the piece of literature for its own sake, but we can get a richer experience if we take a close look at the story to see how it was made.īut how do we get started with annotation in our classes? For one thing, we need a good idea of how annotation can become a grind for students and how it can potentially make them hate reading, which is counterproductive. When it comes to movies, I’m as interest in how the movies are made as I am the movies themselves, and I’m glad someone came up with the idea of bonus features for movie rentals.Īnnotation allows us to access the “bonus features” of things we read. I was amazed to find out that the skydiving scene was real – Tom Cruise actually jumped out of a plane while other skydivers film that scene. I recently watched “Mission Impossible: Fallout and then spent the next hour watching how all the stunts were done. When I rent a movie I’m a sucker for the bonus features. Annotation is an important skill for ELA students to master.
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