Teachers: Reading Tools for students; post-its and annotations

When students complain that they can't understand the information on a large page (or pages) of writing, there are a number of possible reasons: that it really was too complex; that they were just being lazy; that they were overwhelmed by the amount of text; or that they just don’t have any strategies for tackling large amounts of reading.  Most of these issues can be rectified by taking a small amount of time to teach a few simple reading strategies.  Two of the simplest are outlined below.

Making annotations directly onto the page

If students own the text they are using, or if the reading is on a photocopied page, then writing all over the page can be a useful tool.  Many of us have developed an aversion to students writing all over their texts, but what better way to engage with what you’re reading?  Adults do it all the time with texts from which they are learning.  Furthermore, with the rise of electronic texts, ‘defacing’ a page can have less permanent effects!
There are many ways to annotate a reading.  Over time you will develop your own preferences, as will your students.  A place to start, however, might be:
• Identify the left hand page margin as a place to write summary notes.
• Identify the right-hand margin as a place to write questions.
• Identify the top of the page as a place to write unknown words.
• Identify the bottom of the page as the place to write the 3 main points covered on the page.
• Students should also draw arrows, underline, and circle words and phrases that can be copied or summarised in the spaces allocated.

Allow the use of different coloured pencils, pictures and so on.
A huge ! could mean “Look at this important point”, and
a huge ? could mean “I don’t get this bit”.
Below is an example of an annotated text using the above ideas:

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO HAVE STUDENTS ANNOTATE A COPY OF THEIR SUBJECT TEXTBOOK WITHOUT WRITING ON THE HARD COPY, TRY SCANNING THE RELEVANT PAGES AS PDF’s. STUDENTS CAN THEN USE THE ADOBE TOOLS TO ANNOTATE ELECTRONICALLY.

Using Post-it notes

When you have a large amount of written text you wish students to read and understand on their own, and you don’t want them writing on the page, provide small sticky notes that they can use while reading.  They can place sticky notes to mark:

• -          words or passages they don’t understand
• -          ideas that are appealing to them
• -          information that is new to them
• -          information they already know
• -          a mistake they find
• -          ideas that are important
• -          ideas that are unimportant
• -          and so on

You just need to establish what you want them to look for beforehand.  You might be resourceful enough to find different coloured post-its to denote different things on a page (eg. ‘The red post-it is to mark the most important idea’).  Students can, of course, write notes on their post-its.

You need to follow-up on the reading and have students DO something with their post-it pages.  Perhaps they could write out dot-points based on their post-its.