Then you try to recite your answer out loud in your own words, without looking at your notes. Then you can continue on, but remember to review your notes when you are done with your reading. Cornell notes are often used during a lecture but can also be used while reading a text. On the right-hand side, you write down notes as you listen or read. In the left-side column, you add in questions and elaborate on the things you wrote on the other side. It follows this general structure:.
When annotating a work of fiction, such as a novel or short story, look for key elements, such as:. Figure 1. Identifying the 5 stages of a plot will help you as you annotate works of fiction.
Figure 2. Recognizing which point of view is being used is another helpful tool in annotating. Reading and writing! Essays and books are usually organized around a central idea or argument, known as a thesis statement. They need a why. I got a lot out of reading both of them. However, the way I read them was completely different. While I read McDermott, I studied DiAngelo, and that meant I had my pen in hand for White Fragility , underlining important quotes and writing occasionally in the margins.
I was reading it in part for a discussion group, and wanted to be prepared to contribute. And even when we entered into the chat, I had my pen in hand once again ready to annotate as people said things I wanted to remember and called attention to passages that I might have missed. We want to empower our students with a reason to annotate. So here are five reasons from my own experience where annotation has been a useful tool.
Annotating helps minimize the usual distractions should I work out today? Are we out of milk? Annotating helps keep my focus on the task at hand instead of on other enticing ideas. I can find myself in the weeds with some difficult reading sometimes, and annotation helps me process what I read. I write a comment off to the side about what I think the passage means, or why it matters. This tends to be what I do with difficult non-fiction to get through it like that Bakhtin guy that popped up in virtually every class I took in graduate school.
Annotation prepares students with something meaningful to say in class. When I do online discussions with my students I require them to be quoting from what we are reading. I also have a loose policy about classroom discussions that they need to be working from the text when they say something. Backing up what you say with evidence is a valuable skill, and annotation prepares students to present thinking with evidence.
I always give my final essay topics to students before we start reading a novel. That way, they can annotate strategically as they go. If they are writing a character analysis, for example, they might begin the book by annotating about every character.
As they get closer to the middle, they can begin to kick characters to the curb and make a final decision about who they would like to write about. But even without the topic in advance, a well annotated book will be an asset that will save them time writing. Prior to reading the text, the students create a visual representation or symbol for the concept or element of focus for the learning target. When the students annotate the text, they use the illustration they created.
I recently used this strategy to teach Hamlet. Specifically, we focused on the seven elements of Shakespearean tragedies. Before reading the texts, students drew visuals or symbols of each element. Students could choose any illustration that enhanced their learning. After the students created their illustrations, I selected chunks of the texts for the students to annotate throughout our reading of the play. The process of creating an illustration helps students synthesize information and increases student engagement and creativity.
It makes annotating texts a more hands-on experience and makes their learning meaningful and personal. One challenge with this assignment occurs when students believe they cannot draw, do not have artistic talent, or are not creative. Allowing less artistic students to use symbols or simple drawings also emphasizes the importance of student choice. The purpose of the assignment is to capture the symbolism of concepts, so they can create any marking that represents their perception and understanding of a concept.
Another annotation strategy is collaborative annotation, or an annotation on a shared text by multiple students. During this lesson, the students were instructed to write two extended comments and pose one question per page of text.
The next set of students had to do the same, but they could comment on the text or a previous annotation from another student.
0コメント