Annotation is the action of writing your thinking on the page. Thinking through the text and showing evidence of your thinking is a throwback skill to elementary school teachers and middle school teachers stopping to demonstrate their thinking as they read. While the wilderness is beneficial when exploring, we don't want to get stuck in the wilderness with no water, no food, and no shelter. Sometimes the wilderness of reading is too wild and students choose not to enter it at all. While I don't often like to send students into the wilderness of reading without guidance, I think that this strategy provided her some valuable information that I find my students struggle with to this day: Students get lost in reading and can't find their way out. She then went back and taught us how to annotate our reading as a means to clarify the confusion. In my tenth grade year of high school, my high school English teacher and later on my mentor teacher started to teach us annotation using Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The American Scholar" and "Self-Reliance." She assigned the reading one night, and the next day we entered her classroom utterly confused. In this post, I will outline how I go about teaching annotation skills, providing purpose for annotation, and how to keep mixing it up to keep kids interested. Annotation is a brand new skill for middle-schoolers. In the past, I have done Article of the Week from Kelly Gallagher to teach annotation skills, but I am finding that online learning is causing me to adapt to a new way to teach annotation while online. I use non-fiction reading to implement this strategy because it establishes a routine for the rest of the year when we encounter a nonfiction text, and it transitions nicely to when we are dealing with larger works of fiction. I want to take a moment to pause and acknowledge the first skill that I teach students every school year is always the same: annotation in reading. I look forward to this transition each year. This phase takes place right around the six-week mark and involves focusing more on content than on routines and expectations. There is a movement from the “getting to know you phase” to the “we can finally start learning and growing phase” each year. When we get into the second marking period, I always notice a shift in how my classroom does its business. The first six weeks of back-to-school are filled with getting to know students, testing, and figuring out our classroom routines.
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