Annotation Exercise

Post date: Oct 17, 2011 4:02:10 AM

Here is a description of an annotation exercise that I use with my 8th graders. It works fairly well and seems a little more intuitive than the 4A approach.

The students mark either an exclamation point, question mark, or comma in the margins as they read. The exclamation point represents something that surprised them, the question mark for a question they had, and the comma denotes a point that made them stop and think. By each punctuation mark, they write their reaction to that part of the text. It is not necessary to write “this surprised me because,” as the exclamation point says that already. In this way, they learn to briefly write their feelings about a text in the same way more advanced readers do. At first, I thought this form of note taking was sort of contrived, and there are times that I think the students have a hard time responding in this way, but I now think that it is really helpful for them. They are reacting to their lack of experience in annotating, rather than the form of the activity, and creating these structured ways of responding helps them get over this hurdle so that responding to the text will hopefully become a more natural process.