My focus for the balance of this week with my third grade intervention group of students is working with context clues.  Many of these students are not fluent readers.  When they come across unknown words, the strategy used most often is to simply skip over the word, losing the meaning of the text completely.  I have been looking at research and teaching ideas for context clues.

One web site I studied recently is at http://ela.rusdtech.net/Language%20Arts%20Guide/LA%20Guide-Context%20Clues.pdf.  This site discusses the importance of context clues to help struggling readers make meaning of text.  It elaborates on syntactic and semantic clues and how each can help a reader figure out a word and/or its meaning.  Context clues help readers come to a correct pronunciation of a word, determine a meaning for a word, and read more quickly with understanding.

The instructional implications, according to this article, include teachers modeling the use of context clues.  Teachers can use prompts such as "Does that sound right?" and "Does that make sense?" to encourage students to think about word meanings.  Also, teach students to use context clues along with phonics/decoding skills.

My favorite part of this article is the list of question stems to promote the use of context clues by students.

          "You said ____________.  Does that make sense?"

          "You said ____________.   Does that sound right?"

          "It could be ________________, but look at ________________."

          "Can the rest of the sentence help you?"

          "Try that again and think about what would make sense."

          "Try that again and think about what would sound right."

          "How did you know it was _______________?"

          "Try that agan."

It is nice to have some specific things to say to the students as they are attempting to think through and use context clues.  I am having students underline the surrounding words they used as clues to determine meaning of a specific word.  They enjoy being detectives and looking for clues.





 

 

In my quest for good teaching on text annotation, I found information on what I believe is a section of a teacher's blog on a web site belonging to Mid-Pacific Institute.   It begins by asking a survey question of parents:  Do you read with a pen/pencil in hand?  Yes or No  Parents were asked to respond by email so that the class could analyze the results.  I can't be sure by the section I was able to locate and read, but I think it is a second grade class.  The teacher tells the readers that her class is full of interactive readers.  She states, "The children are learning to leave tracks of their thinking on the pages as they read..."

 

This teacher went on the explain how her students go right past the yellow highlighters and reach for pencils when they read.  If they are reading textbooks or reference books or anything they are not permitted to write on, they grab their reading logs also.  They write down information, questions, and connections they have with the text.  She taught her class a specific set of marks to use in their annotations, as follows:

 

                               L = new learning
                                   Q = question
                                    * = important information
                                   R = Reminds me....(connection)

 

The children in this class collaborated as they read a book consisting of a paragraph and intricate illustrations on each page.  Together they talked as a group as they learned new things and made connections with the text and illustrations.  For each page, the students wrote down one thing they learned and one connection or question.

 

This teacher really has the right things going on in her class.  At least from what she stated in her blog, it sounds like a dream class.  She says that when she shows an educational video, her students automatically reach for their reading logs and pencils.  They frequently ask her to pause the video so they can write down important information in their logs.

 

My hope is to instill the love of learning in my students so that they willingly, and even anxiously (dare I hope?), record their thoughts as they read.  I have plenty of journals and sticky notes for those pages they aren't not allowed to mark on.  I would love nothing more than for them to be so excited about their reading and notetaking that I run out of sticky notes and get to buy some more! 

 

I love the quote from the first paragraph above: The children are learning to leave tracks of their thinking on the pages as they read.  That is such a neat way to think of annotating text.  I plan to use that analogy as I begin working with a new group of third graders this coming week.

I am preparing to begin working with a special group of third graders on reading skills and after reading several articles about text annotation, I have decided to work with them on this skill.  It will help me see where they are not only with reading skills, but with comprehension.  As I teach them to annotate, I will get a glimpse into their thinking and comprehension.

As I began searching for text and reading articles to prepare for this, I came across another great one.  The article is entitled Annotation as a Powerful Reading Tool.  The web address is comprehensiontoolkit.com.  It quotes a Harvard College document which is sent to their incoming freshmen in order to prepare them for college academics.  I will quote word for word what Harvard tells these incoming students (guides.hcl.harvard.edu/sixreadinghabits):

          Make all of your reading thinking intensive. . .

          Mark up the margins of your text with WORDS: ideas that occur to you, notes about things that
            seem important to you, reminders of how issues in a text may connect with class discussion or
            course themes. This kind of interaction keeps you conscious of the REASON you are reading and
            the PURPOSES your instructor has in mind.  Later in the term, when you are reviewing for a test
            or project, your maginalia will be useful memory riggers.

            Develop your own symbol system: asterisk a key idea, for example, or use an exclamation point
            for the surprising, absurd, bizarre. . . . .  Like your marginalia, your hieroglyphs can help you
            reconstruct the important observations that you made at an earlier time.  And they will be
            indispensable when you return to a text later in the term, in search of a passage or an idea for a
            topic, or while preparing for an exam or project.

            Get in the habit of hearing yourself ask questions -- "What does this mean?" "Why is he or she
            drawing that conclusion?"  "Why is the class reading this text?" etc.  Write the questions down
            (in your margins, at the beginning or end of the reading, in a notebook, or elsewhere).  They are
            reminders of the unfinished business you still have with a text: something to ask during class
            discussion, or to come to terms with on your own, once you've had a chance to digest the
            material further, or have done further reading.

There is really no reason to wait until students go to college to teach them to really think about their reading.  It should be second nature for them by then!  I have not taught the concept of the symbols, or hieroglyphs, before, but will ease my students into that also after they become comfortable with writing their thoughts in the margins.  As I read that, it made such good sense. 

Harvard includes five other reading habits along with text annotation if you care to check out their website.  They are previewing, summarizing and analyzing, looking for patterns, contextualizing, and comparing and contrasting.  They review all six of these habits in an effort to promote thoughtful reading and help new students become academically successful.  How much easier would it be for college students if they arrive with all of these skills well in place long before their college studies begin!  All teachers, elementary and secondary, can help see that this happens for them.

            

 

 

I just completed reading the article suggested by Dr. Slick entitled "Beyond the Yellow Highlighter: Teaching Annotation Skills to Improve Reading Comprehension."  I have seen some of those textbooks referred to in the first paragraph that have almost every word on the page highlighted.  When I've purchased used textbooks, I look through them to find one with no or at least very little highlighting.  I was taught to be very specific about what I highlighted or marked in the text.  The reasoning was that if I used the book to take a test, how would I find the important points if everything was highlighted?  I learned to actually annotate the text instead of just using a highlighter.  I am also a huge fan of sticky notes.  Some of my teaching books look like they have multi-colored whiskers!

 

Annotating text is an extremely important skill.  I began working in earnest on annotation with my third graders about three years ago.  It dawned on me that handing them a highlighter or asking them to underline important sentences really didn't help them.  I discovered I had to be very specific in teaching them reading strategies.  This article is very enlightening with some new ideas for me.

 

I never thought of using student responses to text to determine the way they think about the text.  I do have them do a quick-write after their first reading of the text, which would be perfect for seeing how they think about the text. 

 

National Geographic magazine has been a perfect avenue for me to teach my students annotation since they are consumable.  All of our third graders are doing it now.  We select a specific reading skill to focus on for each selection and base all of the activities around that skill.  One was main idea and supporting details.  As the students read, they underlined the main idea of each subtopic and marked it with an MI.  Supporting details were marked with SD.  New vocabulary was highlighted.  If it was content specific, they used one color highlighter.  General vocabulary was highlighted in another color of their choice.  After each paragraph or other break in the text, students wrote a few words to remind them of important points.  If they had questions, they wrote them on sticky notes.  These are used on their question generation page where they are asked to come up with questions they still have about the topic after reading.  I encourage them to do some research and find the answers to some of their questions.

 

We do annotation with other texts also.  Students need experience with both literary and informational text.  After modeling text annotation several times, even my third graders caught on and were able to do a remarkable job on their own.

 

The bookmark on the second page is a great idea.  I plan on making a version of it to use at my school.  Annotations are also useful when students come together to discuss a text.  They can easily recall important information and compare their thoughts with others'. 

 

While most of my third graders are not capable of the detailed thought processes demonstrated on the annotations in the articles, they are at least on their way.  As they become comfortable with their metacognition, they are able to share easily with classmates and are not afraid of differing opinions.  It is an excellent way to facilitate the sharing between and among students of their reading.  Through these discussions students learn to engage more deeply in the reading of the text.

 

After posting and then reading this post, I looked at the article I had printed out and realized that I had annotated the text!  I have things marked and comments written in the margins, along with new ideas.  It really does just come naturally after doing it for so long.  I even write notes in my cookbooks - how much we liked a recipe, if anyone didn't like it, good for company, quick or easy to make, etc.  My cookbooks are more useful to me when I look for a particular recipe in the future.