I am a big believer in teaching kids to annotate a text. When I first started disseminating this idea to teachers more than ten years ago, I received rather lukewarm response. But today, I see many schools advertising this as one of their key reading strategies. I am very pleased that the strategy has taken root in schools although I am aware that there is still a lot of just mindless underlining and scribbling of who? what? where? etc.
I often urge teachers not to just be concerned about answers to comprehension questions. They should also check the annotations in their students' texts because the annotations tell us how well a child has read and thought through the text. Indeed, a reader's active engagement with text is evident from her/his jottings, highlighting, questions, comments and inserts.
Cris Tovani, author and English teacher, describes these jottings or marginalia in a short article here.
