For literacy I've been doing a lot of Cornell Notes and variations of them. So I struggled to come up with a good October strategy to blog about. I decided to write about one I learned in grad school and used during student teaching. If I write about it now, I figure that will motivate me to try it in the next few weeks.
It's called Annotating the Textbook. I don't use that name with students because if you say annotating they think it's something intense and don't want to try. For this strategy you take a piece of the textbook, (start with a small chunk) and have the students read it and take notes. But the key is how they are taking notes. As they read they have to jot everything they think. It's crucial that you model this for them or they won't get what they should out of it. Their notes should look like a stream of thoughts and questions. They can even draw quick images if that works for them. It doesn't all have to be scientific! The idea is that you are teaching them what good readers do autmatically. One big thing is making connections and visualizing.
It's similar to when you ask them to make connections, but you don't use the word make connections. They don't even realize they are doing it.
To make this strategy more understandable/useable I will post my sample/model and then if I get some good student examples I will post them.
I think I'll try it with a high interest article then the text.
One more just quick idea I wanted to write about is comics. Every year I want to incorporate making comics into my lesson. I tried again and had somewhat of a failure. I had the students do a comic project. But I ended up with mostly nice study guides and very little creativity. So it wasn't a complete failure because they still had content...but the comic part flopped. I modified a project I did a few years ago and tried to make it less broad. But, I still think I had too much info at a time.
I'm not going to give up. My next idea is to try to start by giving them a fill in the blank comic so they get some ideas. Try to work them toward creativity. Then start with a short comic about one small topic. So we'll see how that goes!
But for today the weather is beautiful and it's a weekend so I'm going to enjoy not being at school! Happy Saturday!
