We are a full week into our literary nonfiction and memoir book clubs, and I’m happy to report most students completed their first required reading goal for our first book club meeting on January 17. This past Monday I introduced four options for taking reading notes and strategically annotating their books. I built on strategies we learned last semester and folded in a few new approaches as well that tie into last week’s mini-lesson on themes, central ideas, and issues—I feel like all of these were doable for my 8th graders, and they loved the element of choice. I also appreciated some students had some creative interpretations of the strategies and were engaged in their thinking with their notes.
You can see a tutorial video I created for my students who were absent for the mini-lesson or who needed to hear it again; I posted this video in our Canvas course LMS as well as our class blog.
The slideshow below is also available to students in both virtual learning spaces as I add student created work to showcase and highlight as the possibilities for notetaking.
I do provide different kinds of paper and a plethora of Post-It notes for my students to use. Please enjoy the digital gallery of student work in progress below; overall, I feel like the quality of thinking and notes is much better than what I saw with my previous 8th graders. However, I feel my instruction on annotating and closer reading has been stronger this academic year as well.
I’m excited to see what options they choose and the notes they create for our January 24 book club meeting! In my next blog post, I’ll provide an update on our first book club meeting (held January 17) discussions and reflections on the book club meeting as well as their meeting prep work.
Living in the Layers 