A Monster Calls - Book Annotating

I got around purchasing an entire class' worth of little post-its (which can get expensive) by just cutting up the bigger post-its.

Mid-way through last year I attended the AATE/ALEA National English Conference in Hobart and was particularly taken with American educator Cris Tovani's work on getting students to engage with active-reading. In particular, Tovani spoke about bringing the focus back on reading during a class novel study through the use of independent annotating. She termed these as 'V.I.P.s' aka 'Very Important Points'.

In this lecture, Tovani explained that the students are given a range of coloured post-it notes, with each colour corresponding with a kind of annotation, and the examples she gave from her own teaching demonstrated a wonderful array of student-led discussion points. Inspired by this, I decided to give it a go with a novel study in one of my own classes.

The book in question was A Monster Calls, which I matched up with my mixed ability Year 10 class. Instead of leaving the annotating as homework I decided to eschew the use of comprehension questions in favour of dedicating more time to reading in class, and then letting the students annotate after each chapter was completed with the use of a pre-provided schema to guide them.

Cris Tovani, pedagogue extraordinaire

On this schema I outlined 6 different categories to correspond with the 6 different coloured post-it notes supplied. These were:

• Connect: Note when something from the book reminds you of something from your life, or something you have seen/read, or connects to a prediction you have made about the novel. 
• Question: Write down questions you have about the novel as you think them up while you read.
• Infer/Predict: Flag bits where you have used examples from the text to figure out something in relation to the novel, or have made a new prediction.
• Conflict: Note parts of the text where conflict occurs (this particular novel study was part of a larger unit on texts that deal with conflict)
• Monitor: Highlight parts that didn't make sense to you at first, or at all, or words that were unfamiliar to you.
• Evaluate: This can be your opinion about things happening in the story, things you like/dislike, or just general thoughts. 

The schema can be downloaded here.

A sample from class.

I was surprised (and happy) at how enthusiastically a lot of students got into this. One student seemed to take it as a challenge to see how many flags he could put into each chapter. The upshot of this, besides increased engagement with the text, is that the students were able to use their own annotations to call upon examples to use in their own independent analysis of the novel later on. 

While we're talking about novel study, here are three simple and relevant pointers I've picked up over the last 8 years in regards to teaching novels with mixed ability junior classes:

• Keep the novels in the classroom. If the students take them home then you might not see them all again, and it becomes difficult for these students to stay on-task in lessons that require them to have the books in front of them if they've forgotten to bring them.
• For mixed ability classes, read the entire text aloud while the students read along. This will ensure that you can stick to some kind of schedule/timeframe... a novel study can become messy if students are left to read on their own; some will finish the book in the first few days, others will never get past the first few pages. I know there are very strong arguments against this practice, however I was wholly converted last year by Steven Layne's fantastic lecture on reading aloud, which turned out to be perfect for my own Western Sydney context. 
• Pick a novel of shorter length. The reading ages of junior students vary more the closer they get to senior school, you could have some students who would read a 900 page Game of Thrones novel and others who would need help focusing on finishing one of Roald Dahl's wonderful children's novels. You typically only have 50-70% of a term to get through a novel and the lower ability students will lose focus if they are asked to sustain engagement with an adult-length novel. By all means, extend the more literate students with extra texts that they can read on their own - chances are that they already have a love of reading if they are this literate - but it's also important not to leave the rest of the class behind and to give them every chance of appreciating what reading can offer.
  

There will be detractors in regards to the above, but keep in mind that there are also students who often get to Year 11 and are able to say, "I've never read a single book, not even in previous years of English when the rest of the class read the class novel". By reading aloud during class time, and ensuring that it's a novel that the whole class can get through, the aforementioned disengaged students will get to Year 11 and be able to say, "Actually, I read an entire book, along with the rest of the class".   

On a final note, I also highly recommend A Monster Calls because it's a poignant, highly engaging read that will prompt discussion and stay with the reader long after it's finished.