At the start of the school year, we posted about the benefits of incorporating close reading in your classroom and gave you the step-by-step process to help you get started. And for those of you who teach honors and AP level high schoolers, you can jump right into that. For the rest of us, here’s the best place to start: one paragraph out of an entire article. This allows your students to truly annotate the paragraph without feeling overwhelmed by an entire article. It also allows you to carve out 10 minutes of class time and that feels much more doable than 20-45 minutes, or longer.
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When your students are annotating a paragraph rather than the entire article, the how-to is similar:
- Locate an article. This can be something related to what you’re currently covering in class or an interesting recent discovery. Not sure where to get an article? Follow us on Twitter for access to high-interest articles every day. The most important thing to consider when selecting an article is to make sure it’s high-interest.
- Select a paragraph. Once you’ve found an article, choose one paragraph that stands out. It should capture the heart of the article’s point, but it also needs to be something that your students will find highly engaging. (There’s an example at the bottom so keep reading!)
- Reformat for easy annotations. Copy and paste the paragraph into a document (such as Google Docs or Microsoft Word) so it can be edited. When students are doing a close reading, you want them to show their thoughts on paper so they need room in the margins and at the end of paragraphs.
- Print out a class set. If you’re using interactive notebooks, have students glue them into the notebook. Some advice: don’t allow your students to use highlighters with this activity. Allowing highlighters tends to turn into one big highlighted page with none of their thoughts recorded. If you want their annotations to stand out on black-and-white copies, allow them to use colored pencils or colored ink. Since you’re focusing on one paragraph as a part of a longer piece, you can either read the article in its’ entirety aloud, pass out class copies for students to read individually, project it on your screen, assign it for homework, allow your students to read it as part of group work, or… anything else that might work for you and your students.
- Select keys to use with your students. Go through close reading as a class several times until you feel that they’re ready to do it on their own. Reiterate that the important piece of this assignment is to show (with your pen or pencil) what you’re thinking. They shouldn’t be worried about right and wrong answers, but should be cognizant of explaining how they arrived at that conclusion. Some examples are:
- <3 = a favorite part
- ! = something that makes you say “Woah!”
- ? = confusion
- * = the most important part of the passage
- C = connection
- Push them to go a step further. You can start out with just the keys listed above but once they’ve mastered that, they should start explaining the why behind each symbol. For example, instead of just a <3 at their favorite part, have them write why it’s their favorite part. Continually remind them that it can be (or at least start out as) something as simple as noting “<3 I saw coral reef when we snorkeled on our cruise this summer,” on a sentence about a new coral reef discovery. The idea is that they’re connecting to things they already know or things they can relate to their own life.
Here is an article from our Twitter feed: Meet the World’s Highest Concentration of Gray Reef Sharks.
We’ve selected an important paragraph from the article above and formatted in on a Google Doc. All you have to do is click here to print it for your students.
Because it’s such a beneficial practice, you can gradually add lengthier passages for your students to practice their close reading skills. Once they’ve mastered one paragraph, add a second. Then a full-page, and ultimately, an entire article. For the instructions to teach your students to annotate an entire article, click here. For the full version and a printable, formatted article on nanorobots’ ability to target cancerous cells, click here.
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