A Teacher’s Guide on How to Annotate a Text: 4th, 5th & 6th Grade Students

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The transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” for an elementary student is a big one. When students read to learn, they are focused less on decoding each individual word, and more on starting to read for meaning.

This is exciting! It gives students a newfound freedom and independence with their reading, but it can also be a challenge. Teaching students to annotate a text is a great way to provide some scaffolding as students learn to make sense of a text.

What Does it Mean to Annotate a Text?

Annotating is when you engage with a text by taking thoughtful notes as you read. Annotation is a great skill to teach students because it encourages them to read with a specific goal in mind. 

The process of annotating a text also promotes a depth of understanding that students would not acquire by simply skimming the passage. It requires students to be actively engaged with the text, which deepens their understanding.

Another way to look at annotation is as an authentic way to review certain reading skills. For example, annotating allows students to notice patterns in a text. Students might notice common themes or elements of a genre, such as quotes, character traits, and more. This is a more authentic way to dig into the genre and elements of literature.

Ways Students Can Annotate a Text

There are tons of ways you can annotate a text. The good news is that you can’t really go “wrong”. The bad news is that it can be overwhelming to pick an annotation style. Here are some styles we recommend.

1. Highlighting and underlining. Some students do very well with color coding, and this is a great opportunity to use that. Teach students to use different colors to identify different text components like the topic sentence, key details, main idea, title, or transitions. 

This strategy works particularly well if students are practicing a skill like differentiating between fact and opinion. They can highlight facts in one color, and opinions in another. Or, if students are reading just an opinion piece, have them highlight the opinion itself in one color, and the supporting reasons in another color.

2. Using different symbols. When annotating a text, teach students to circle keywords, put a question mark next to an unknown word or something they’d like clarification on, or put a star next to something important.  

This is a great opportunity to have students come up with their own ideas for annotation, as well. Maybe they want to write their initials next to something they agree with, or draw a heart around words they’d like to use in their own writing. Anything works as long as it encourages students to engage with the text in a meaningful way.

Plus, when students need information later to answer questions or complete a written response, they can quickly refer back to their notes using the symbols.

3. Post-it notes. We are a sucker for Post-It notes! Post-its are a great way for students to mark a longer text. They can use a Post-It note to write down questions they have, thoughts they want to remember, or even to write a quick summary at the end of a paragraph or section. 

You can also use this annotation strategy when reading out of a textbook that you need to reuse the next year. It’s not always realistic to have students writing all over a text, so Post-Its can help in these instances.

4. Scavenger hunt. If you have the flexibility and want to make annotation more fun for students, give them a list of certain things to hunt for. Even giving students five minutes at the beginning of a lesson to do a little annotation scavenger hunt can increase engagement.

Have students circle rhyming words, draw a rectangle around proper nouns, or draw a triangle around the funniest word they can find. This is not necessarily going to promote a deeper understanding of the text, but it may increase interest for a first read, and then you can utilize another strategy to deepen the meaning.

Why is Annotating Important?

We’ve talked a lot about how to annotate a text, but let’s go deeper into why annotation is important.

First, annotating a text helps students engage with the text in a meaningful way. During annotation, students are actively engaging with the text and continually processing what they are reading.

Annotating also helps students keep track of questions they may have or talking points they can use to discuss the text. Since students are engaged in active reading while annotating, they can check for understanding more easily and catch themselves when they have questions about the text.

Second, annotating helps with comprehension. As we talked about before, students are transitioning from learning to read to reading to learn. Annotating helps foster understanding of the text as a whole and pushes students beyond simply reading the words. If students write down the main idea and key supporting details, they will see how the text works together to be a cohesive piece.

Annotating a text also helps with recall. We ultimately want students to remember what they read, and annotation is a skill that encourages this. We know that writing something down improves our likelihood of remembering it.

Students can also refer back to these notes, instead of rereading entire sections of the text. And since students are more engaged in what they have read, they also have mental recall of some information.

Additionally, annotating promotes deeper thinking. Annotation encourages students to make inferences and really think about what they are reading. Asking questions while reading is also a key skill to becoming a successful reader. When students stop to think about and process the information, they can go beyond the surface level. Why would the character do that? Why would they respond in that way?

Not sure how to introduce and practice annotating a text with students? Check out our annotating resources! After students work on reading and annotating a text, it will help them better understand what they read and answer comprehension questions!

What makes this resource perfect is that it scaffolds the process for students. With our step-by-step guide, your students will understand how to annotate in no time!

We hope this blog helped you come up with a routine for your classroom. It can be tricky to teach students how to annotate a text, so take it slow and add one element at a time.

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