language arts Archives - David Rickert

5 Steps to Great Annotations

May 29, 2018 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

Annotation is a valuable skill, but it’s not one that comes naturally. It has to be taught. Most of our students come to us used to reading books for pleasure without a pencil in hand (that is, if they read at all.) And if reading is a lifelong habit, this is what we should be doing with books 90% of the time.

But in an academic setting, we might be asked to do something else with them: writing a paper, participating in an online discussion, or many other tasks that require us to think differently about the book than if we simply read for pleasure.

Here’s an example. This summer I’m reading Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao for an AP summer reading club. While it’s basically a pleasure read for me, I’ll also be discussing it with other teachers in a few weeks. In order to contribute to the conversation I need to be making some notes along the way so that I have something important to say.

Annotation is thinking made visible. However, students may not know what they should be thinking about when they read, or need some help making those things explicit. Here are 5 things that we can ask students to do while they annotate and why those strategies are important.

1. Ask Questions.

Students can ask questions like the following: Where are you confused? Where might you have to reread? What guesses can you make about what will happen next?

Why this is important: at a really basic level, this strategy allows students to come to class with something to contribute: pose your question and get an answer. This can be a powerful strategy to bring to class the following day. What questions do you have about the text? Are these questions we should know the answer to? What questions do you have that prevent you from going further?

Asking questions also teaches kids to pay attention to when they get stuck and what strategies they can then use to move forward. Sometimes answering questions is essential for understanding what’s going on. Sometimes the author doesn’t want you to know. It’s important for students to know the difference and be able to hold uncertainty as they read.

2. Add personal responses.

What does this text remind you of in your own life? In other texts? In popular culture and current events? What are your opinions about what the characters are doing and what happens to them?

One of my favorite annotations of all time was one from a student who wrote “What a bitch.” about Caroline Bingley in the margins of Pride and Prejudice. Here’s someone who connected so deeply with the story that she thought of her as an actual character. And her use of what would commonly be called profanity and she never would have used in a paper, indicated that she saw this as a place where she could speak freely in her own voice. That’s what we want.

Why this is important: If students ONLY did this for annotation, we would be in good shape. We would know they were actively reading and making the book their own by fostering deep connections to their experiences. When students read Frankenstein we want them to be thinking about all the different ways that science can cross moral and ethical boundaries. When they read To Kill A Mockingbird we want them to be outraged at the injustice while also recognizing that it still exists today. This is a record of the ability of reading to enlarge our world and get us thinking.

3. Draw pictures and/or symbols

Annotations don’t always have to be words. Quick sketches can be a great way to annotate, and a system of symbols can be a quick way to have kids annotate certain things that they will see repeatedly. Plus, it’s fun to create a secret code that no one else will understand.

Why this is important. It can be a fun way to engage in an activity that many students find to be a burden. It can be appealing to people like me that are naturally hard-wired to draw things. But it can also be a way to get kids to think differently about a text. What would happen if you told your class that for the next chapter they can only use pictures to annotate? They might find some great new insights that way, and it can be a good way to add some variety when they are halfway through a book and need something new to make annotation fresh again.

4. Mark things that are important.

Being able to instinctively know what is important is a hard skill to develop and one that requires a decent amount of reading experience in order to be able to do on the fly (This is why I never tell students to annotate examples of foreshadowing because most of them don’t have the ability to see it.) However, here are a few things that authors do in order to tell the reader that something in important. Students can look for these as they read:

Repetition: If you keep seeing it, whether it be a word, a phrase, an idea, or a character, it’s important.
Similes and metaphors: If an author wants to emphasize something, they may use an especially striking simile or metaphor (or a series of them) to explain it.
Lots of detail: If something is explained in great detail it’s important. If you see a large paragraph describing a turtle crossing the road in minute detail (especially if it seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the passage), there’s something going on there.
Opposites: One way to show that something is important is to juxtapose it with something that is completely opposite or out of place with the rest of the passage.

5. Summarize what you’ve read.

Summarizing is an underrated skill, and not as easy as people think. Can you summarize the events or a chapter or the main points of an article in a sentence?

Why this is important: Summarizing is the best way to really process something you’ve read to really prove that you’ve understood it. Furthermore, if you’re reading a long novel it’s a great way to review what happened in each chapter before you take a test or write a paper. It’s a great bread crumb trail of what happened. If you’re reading an article, summarizing the main points is a great active reading strategy that prepares you for class discussions. However, you have to be careful with this one, because I find this is the one that students find most tedious. If students are getting bogged down in annotation, this is the first one I would drop.

Final Thoughts

We don’t necessarily want students to be doing all of these things at once because we want to be careful that we don’t turn students off from reading. Getting kids to love to read is one of the most important things we do as ELA teachers. But we also want them to develop a set of skills that they can use for different occasions. I don’t annotate books I read for pleasure, even though there are some people out there that do. But if I’m reading an article that I am going to use in a paper for a college class, you can bet I’ll have a pen and highlighter close by. In a previous blog post I wrote about how we can rethink our annotation practices so students will find it meaningful. I’ve also written about why students hate annotating and what we can do about it.

It’s also important to model annotation. I don’t give students something to read that I haven’t annotated myself. And if I teach the class a couple of times a day, I can show them how reading something multiple times leads to new insights.

Another helpful strategy is to give them a poem and a non-fiction piece, have them annotate both, and share how they annotated each one differently while still using the above five strategies. You can also have students share what they annotated. Anytime that we can get kids thinking about what they are doing – and more importantly how they were better off for doing it – we will start to build value in a skill.

David Rickert is a high school English teacher in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. He has been teaching for over 20 years and has taught virtually every grade and every subject. David is passionate about developing lessons that make difficult language arts subjects fun and engaging. He is also an author on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Annotation: Why Students Hate It (And How To Fix It)

September 20, 2016 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

Annotation is a common reading strategy used to promote active reading. Annotation is a skill that helps students comprehend what they are reading and leaves a trail of “bread crumbs” for students to follow if they have to respond to the text in writing. Ideally, it will help students make meaning of what they are reading.

As language arts teachers we want students to be good readers and also learn to love reading, and in many ways the two go hand in hand. However, for many students annotation promotes the first goal at the expense of the second. Many of my students who like to read tell me that they hate to annotate. It takes away from the pleasure of reading and makes a chapter of assigned reading that much more time consuming. And as nice as it for teachers to know through annotating that kids have read the book instead of reading Sparknotes, it’s apparent that for many students annotation is something they do for the teacher and not for themselves. They don’t find the value in it and consider it busywork.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way. If we change the way we present annotation to students – and change our expectation of what the end result should be – annotation can be a valuable tool that won’t seem like so much of a chore.

Here are some ideas:

Don’t give students too much to manage.

In the past I have required students to look for literary devices, ask questions, and do chapter summaries. I required them to have a certain number of comments per page. In short I was asking them to do about five different things when they annotated.

What I had to learn was that annotating is essentially multitasking – they have to read and do whatever else I asked them to do. When they were looking for personification and characterization and setting details all while asking them to comprehend what they read at the same time, they were not likely to do any of those things particularly well.

The solution? Give students one thing to focus on while they annotate. That way students can read for comprehension but focus on an important part of the assigned reading. Maybe they can look at setting for one chapter and examine the use of literary devices in the next one. This way they can really build the skill of annotating without becoming overwhelmed.

Have a purpose.

Annotating works well when students have a reason to do it other than “to make you better readers.” I try to tie annotation into a final product, whether it be an essay or a presentation. If they are writing a paper on a particular character from Pride and Prejudice I give them the prompt and tell them what to look for as they read. I don’t want them to have to reread the book again, and I don’t want them going online to find quotes. I model this myself – the books that I teach are heavily annotated so that I don’t have to reread every time I want to find a particular passage. In some cases, I don’t even have to read the book again to teach it – I can read my annotations and go from there.

If students know that annotating will benefit them in concrete ways, it will help them see the value in it.

Give them a break from annotating.

There’s nothing wrong with letting kids read a chapter or two without annotating. Let them just enjoy the book with no strings attached. Better yet, incorporate independent reading in your classroom so they always have an opportunity to read for pleasure.

Do an annotation on the second read.

Something that has worked well for me is to do a simple light annotation the first time students read the book. For struggling readers, it does help give them a way in to a text they might find difficult. But I find a tremendous amount of value in doing a second annotation of what they just read on the following day. The students aren’t spending time keeping track of what’s happening, so they are free to look closer at how the text is put together. This is a great way to address foreshadowing, for instance.

In conclusion

The best thing that we can consider with annotating is to think about how much of the reading task should be taken up with it. It’s not something that many teachers I’ve talked to have ever thought about.

I think a good ratio is annotating should only take up 10-20% of the total time spent reading. That way the vast majority of the time, students are simply reading. The annotating won’t add what is perceived as an unreasonable amount of time, and you can still accomplish a lot.

Annotation is a valuable skill, but the love of reading is even more valuable. We don’t have to sacrifice one or the other if we employ sound strategies for both.

Suspenseful Stories in Language Arts: Writing the Story

October 21, 2015 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

Writing suspenseful stories in the Language Arts classroom can be a fun way to teach students how stories work. In previous posts I shared model texts that I use to teach kids how suspense works. In another post I discussed how you can teach literary devices while creating the suspenseful story. In this post we’ll put it all together and write a story!

First, though, I’d like to share another resource that you can use to discuss suspense. It’s a short CGI film called “Alma” about a little girl that visits a toy store that isn’t what it seems. It’s appropriate for any age, yet suitable creepy. The less said about it before you show it the better – you want kids to be thinking about the moments where suspense happens.

Now on the the story!

The suspenseful story assignment

Here are the guidelines that I give students for the assignment. Feel free to add any other literary devices that you’d like. FlashFictionAssignment

You’ll notice that I set a word limit on them by asking them to write a piece of flash fiction that should be 500 words or less. I give them this boundary because it gives them a length to manage and forces them to think creatively about how to fill the space. In general, if I don’t give them a length requirement, they will lose control of the narrative.

There are plenty of examples of flash fiction out there, and I spent a lot of time finding stories that were a suitable length. Many of them were entertaining, but too short. Some of them were not appropriate. Some were just poorly written.

Three-Minute Fiction

However, I found the best source for great flash fiction on NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction contest page. They haven’t had the contest since 2103, but all of the best stories can be found here, and it’s a treasure trove of stories that you can use. The trick is finding suspenseful stories, though, and I had the best luck with the contest in which a character finds something that they have no intention of returning. They are a little shorter than the required length, but nevertheless terrific examples for what you can accomplish in a few words. Be careful! These are addictive reading.

Here are the stories that I used. Be sure to preview them: some aren’t appropriate for all ages. But there are plenty more on the site to choose from.

Picked Clean

Litter

Snowflake

The Art of Compromise

Ghost Words

Here’s the link to all of the finalists for this contest. There are some other good ones there too.

One Last Thing

One last tip: here’s a great infographic on the physical effects of fear. I use this so that students can describe what is happening to their main character as they encounter their suspenseful situation.

Happy writing!

Don’t keep your students in suspense while waiting for fun lessons! Check out my store for great cartoon products like the one on the left to keep your kids engaged.

Suspenseful Story Writing in Language Arts: Model Texts

October 11, 2015 By David Rickert 6 Comments

Students love to write suspenseful stories, especially around Halloween. They can be a fun diversion in a secondary Language Arts classroom which can sometimes be dominated by essays. But if done properly, they can also teach students a great deal about how stories are constructed using suspense and imagery to create a particular mood. In this post I will address how I teach students about the technique of creating suspense and some of the texts I’ve used to model it. In the second post I will explain how I use writing suspense to teach literary devices. In the third post I will cover how we write the story.

First off, I allow students to write a suspenseful non-fiction story about something that happened to them, or I let them write a fiction piece. However, I tell them they cannot write a horror story. There should be no blood or violence, even implied. Too often students fall into basic horror story tropes that they don’t do particularly well. Also, as you’ll find out in a later post, they aren’t writing a story that is a piece of flash fiction (or three-minute fiction) rather than a full length story. You can certainly do that; however, I find that students need some boundaries or they’ll write too much. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but many students tend to lose control of their writing that way.

The Basics of Suspense

You can do a search for “how to create suspense in writing” and find a lot of good handouts. But the idea is pretty simple: you make your reader wait for something they want to know. There are a couple of ways to do this.

Slow the story down. Many young writers get to an exciting point in a story and speed up the action. The trick is to slow it down by adding details. One way you can do this is to get inside the character’s head and describe what they are feeling. You can also describe in great detail the setting, the slow walk to open the door, and various other things.
Withhold information. Don’t immediately tell your reader what was in the box. Make them wait. Linger over the person’s expression first. Send them out of the room and out of the house. Have them scream “thank you!” or, “Why would you think I would like this?”
Put in a hard decision. Give the character a tough decision to make and have them weigh in their mind what to do. Too many students give the character a choice but then solve it too quickly. Make them weigh the pros and cons by getting inside the character’s head. Better yet, give them two undesirable outcomes and have them choose from those.

I have a couple of model texts that I use with students that get them thinking about suspense. I try to use several different genres as well to help them understand how suspense can be used in a variety of settings. The links to the stories are at the end of the post.

“The Listeners” – Walter de la Mare

This is a frequently anthologized poem with an air of mystery about it. Suspense is created because the traveler knocks on the door a couple of times and receives no answers, and there’s some ghostly listeners as well. Why is he there? What’s the deal with the cryptic message he delivers?

“The Storm” – McKnight Malmar

I love using this story to teach suspense. For one thing, it’s the type of story that students would like to be able to write. A woman is home alone during a storm and believes that someone is looking in the house. She goes to the basement and finds a dead body. I have the students read and annotate looking for examples of the ways to create suspense described above. The part where the woman goes down into the basement and discovers the body is a textbook case of how to create suspense. I usually ask my students what would happen if we simply read that she went downstairs, opened the trunk, and found the body. There’s an awful lot of great imagery in the story as well.

“The Ravine” – Ray Bradbury

This story is a part of the novel Dandelion Wine and describes an older woman taking a shortcut across a ravine to get home, all with the threat of The Lonely One lurking in the background. This is another example of a story that kids would like to be able to write and works particularly well with middle school students. I tend to use “The Storm” over this one because to be honest, it’s a little corny and a little too long. But it would still work well. The chapter that makes up the story is on page 124 in the link. There’s also a pretty cool radio adaptation of the story here.

“The Dare” – Roger Hoffman

This is a nonfiction piece about a boy who is dared to jump in between the wheels of a moving train, stay there for a minute, and roll out the other side. It’s a great example of how you can create suspense as we find out whether or not the narrator will succeed. This is a quick newspaper article.

These selections are the ones that I use in class as models for suspense. In the next post I talk about how to use these works to teach literary devices.

“The Listeners”

“The Storm”

“The Ravine” (“The Whole Town is Sleeping”)

“The Dare”

What Makes a Book Great?

August 30, 2015 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

If you’re a high school English teacher – especially of the AP variety – it’s easy to get smug about books. We believe that some books are better than others and that every student should believe that Hemingway is a better author than Sparks or Rowling. We may not believe that “at least they’re reading something” holds true, and we look in horror at the proliferation of adults reading YA books. At one point or another, I’ve held all of these positions.

However, my view over time has softened quite a bit as my criteria for what makes a good book has changed and become more inclusive. My dad loves Clive Cussler novels. For him they are good books. Enough said. He’s not interested in me telling him he should read something better.

But how do we reconcile that view with our role as teachers? We want students to love to read, but we also want students to read important books that they wouldn’t otherwise, and we want them to think they are great books too. Is there a definition of a great book that teachers and students can both live with? I believe there is, and we can ask two questions to arrive at that answer.

How well does the book achieve its main goal?

According to Thomas Arp in Sound and Sense, the primary goal of all literature is to entertain. Personally, I would broaden that definition to say that the primary goal is to provide a significant experience, because I would never call a book like Elie Wiesel’s Night “entertaining.” But there are plenty of books whose main goal is to provide escape. If the book provides you with a respite from your otherwise boring life, then the author has done what he or she set out to do.

Of course, some books want to do more than just entertain, which brings up the second question:

How significant is that goal?

And it is at this point that we can distinguish between books that merely provide entertainment value and those that provide additional value through giving us a lens into human behavior. We can then claim that Huck Finn is a more significant book than The Hunger Games because Mark Twain has a more significant purpose in his story.

We don’t want to tell our students that the books we read in class are better than the ones they read outside of school (if they read at all) because they never respond well to that. But we can tell them that we are reading books that are more significant, and that will continue to enrich their lives in a second or third reading. As I’ve written in a previous post, Harry Potter has become that for a lot of our students – a series that is entertaining, but also provide a great deal of wisdom as well.

Some of this has been adapted from Thomas Arp’s book Sound and Sense.

For resources that make great works accessible for students, visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store.