Teaching Annotation in Middle School

           I believe that annotating has helped my students in more than any other practice I have implemented in my classroom. Annotation helps students with their metacognition, critical thinking, and close reading skills. I teach annotation in the first few weeks to set the stage for the rest of the year. ANYTIME my students read for my class they should be annotating. The following is an overview of how I introduce this skill to students, the expectations I have, and how it benefits student learning.

   The lesson opens with a read aloud. My students always get really excited about this. I teach seventh grade and they still LOVE to be read to. I always use Goldilocks and the Three Bears; it is short and proves my point beautifully. After the story I move on to define the three types of thinking: literal, inferential, and critical.

Literal thinking is when we think about something a book or story that has actually happened, the author has told us this directly.

Inferential thinking is something you are thinking because of clues left in the story

Critical thinking is your own unique ideas, evaluations, or conclusions. Critical annotations will be very different from reader to reader and depend on the experiences, and attitudes of the reader.

Moving forward I share an example of each of these types of thinking to our story:

Literal: in the Three Little Bears, Goldilocks liked baby bear’s bed the best.

Inferential: It would be inferential thinking to state that Goldilocks was a picky eater. It is inferential because the story does not SAY she is picky, but we can infer this because she does not like Momma or Papa Bear’s porridge.

Critical: Goldilocks is a selfish, reckless person. I can make this critical statement looking at her pattern of breaking and entering, as well as her disregard for others’ personal property.

Moving forward I was to give students a chance to work on this in pairs and eventually on their own. For this purpose I like to use Greek myths. My classes are generally interested in the stories, have some background, and they are quick enough to start every class with for a few days.

We start as a class by reading and annotating a version of Pandora. After students have annotated the entire myth we share our annotations together, and I show them how I would have annotated this text.

We talk about how they can improve, redefine each type of thinking, and sharing our own reactions to the text. We start the next day in the same way using Pandora as our Myth. Again, the students read, annotations and compare their reactions to their peers and my own.

The third day we start reading our first whole class novel. This year my students have done an incredible job inferring and engaging critical in our first novel, Gilgamesh the Hero.

Take a look at some of these samples from my own class; I encourage everyone to explicitly teach and practice annotation in their own classrooms. If you want a copy of these lessons and student handouts you can find them here.