language arts Archives - David Rickert

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 like this one. 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.

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.

What Should I Do On the Second Day of English Class? Read A Poem!

August 7, 2015 By David Rickert 2 Comments

There are a lot of suggestions floating around out there about what to do on the first day of school. But what should you do on the second day in Language Arts? I already did a post on using a short story to establish how you approach the task of reading. In this post I’m going to do a similar activity with a poem.

The poem I’m going to use for this activity is “Mindful” by Mary Oliver. It’s a pretty easy poem, but there’s just enough in there the students will find difficult that will get their brains working. Also, Oliver is a very inspirational poet, and I find that students like the positive, contemplative aspects of her work. Poetry can be a tough sell for kids anyway, so starting off with Sylvia Plath or John Donne is probably not the way to go. So let’s stick with Oliver.

Here’s a link to the poem.

This is what I plan to do with the poem:

1.Where do you get stuck?

This is a poem where kids will go along swimmingly until they get to the middle, I’m guessing right around the “nor.” A lot of poems work this way, and I find that I have to train kids not to bail out too quickly because the heart of the poem is often in the last few lines.

So the next question is: what tools do you have at your disposal for when you get stuck? Obviously you can reread, and that’s almost a requirement for any poem to be experienced fully. Are there any words that you don’t understand, like “acclamation” (which is different than “acclimation”)? Anything that’s worded in a strange way? Most importantly, do you need to know what that word or phrases means to understand the poem? Sometimes you don’t.

2. Who is the speaker?

Obviously it’s important to train kids not to assume the poet is the speaker, but in this case it doesn’t make much difference if they do. What we’re getting at with this question is not just inferences but textual support. If this were the only poem you read by Mary Oliver, what could you tell about her and how do you know? What are her character traits? What does she like to do? Where does she like to be? And where do you see it in the text?

3. What’s the main idea?

The dreaded question! Kids don’t like this one because it gives them the greatest chance of being wrong. But this poem has a pretty easy message to figure out: there is great wisdom to be found in everyday experiences if we simply allow ourselves the time to see them.

This is a great message in a world in which we are overly reliant on technology, but I think it’s a particularly important message for my seniors, many of whom have spend so much time chasing after grades and activities that them have left themselves very little time to pause and figure out who they are. I know several students from the past that graduated and found themselves adrift for this very reason.

A bonus activity!

I’m going to do a Mary Oliver unit later in the year and this will be one of the activities that I’ll do, but it would be a good second day activity as well. I would have them look at something they find for much longer than they would have to see what they notice and take a picture of it. It could be anything – a flower, the front yard, anything that you see on a daily basis that you don’t give much thought to. Here’s an article about how to take mindful photographs you could use. You could even have them write a poem that accompanies the photograph, or create a bulletin board from all the pictures that people have taken. What fun!

If you’re looking for a fun way to review the Parts of Speech during the first week of school, check out my set of comics and activities called Grammar Comics: Parts of Speech.

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