
I also love reading other bloggers’ takes on annotating! Here is a fantastic post from The Wordy Habitat all about annotating. The more creative you get with annotation, the more engaged your students will be.“How I Annotate Books” with Pages of Hayley
Book annotations how to#
If you don’t have a digital reading platform, you can also teach how to annotate a basic PDF text using simple annotation tools like highlights or comments. These include highlighters, text comments, sticky notes, mark up tools for underlining, circling, or drawing boxes, and many more. Most digital reading platforms include a number of tools that make annotation easy. Teach Your Students How to Annotate a PDF They can also write an opinion on a particular section, so there’s no right or wrong answer.

Ask them to circle a word they don’t know, look up that word in the dictionary, and write the definition in a comment. Keep It SimpleĮspecially for younger or struggling readers, help your students develop self-confidence by keeping things simple. You can modify your rubric as goals and students’ needs change over time. This provides guidance for your students and makes grading easier for you. When you know what your annotation goals are for your students, it can be useful to develop a simple rubric that defines what high-quality and thoughtful annotation looks like. You might have them explain how headings and subheads connect with the text, or have them identify facts that add to their understanding.

When first teaching students about annotation, you can help shape their critical analysis and active reading strategies by giving them specific things to look for while reading, like a checklist or annotation worksheet for a text. This type of modeling and interaction helps students understand the thought process that critical reading requires.ģ. Show students how you might underline key words or sentences and write comments or questions, and explain what you’re thinking as you go through the reading and annotation process.Īnnotation Activity: Project a short, simple text and let students come up and write their own comments and discuss what they’ve written and why.

Display a sample text and think out loud as you make notes. One of the most effective ways to teach annotation is to show students your own thought process when annotating a text.

