How to Properly Highlight

Although I found Tovani’s chapter 6 very interesting, it was way too long of a chapter for a topic on marking up texts. How your students read a text is very important and should definitely be taught. I always found myself reading and the information would go through one ear and then right out of the other. Or I would find myself reading one sentence over and over again because I could not take in the information since my mind was off somewhere else. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Bird,  was my favorite teacher in elementary school. She helped me out a lot with my reading comprehension and taught me ways to make reading a little bit easier. I used to highlight texts like it was my job. I would end up with a whole page highlighted because I found it all very important. Luckily I had an amazing teacher who helped me out.

 Mrs. Bird showed me a new way to read texts and pick out what is important.  Instead of highlighting, I would underline important words or words I did not understand. I drew arrows point at important information and then would write a summary about it. The summaries really helped me understand what exactly was going on in the paragraph I had just read. It helped me to interpret it into my own words that made sense to me. I wouldn’t just mark up stuff that was important, but I would also mark stuff that was confusing to me. I looked up words and created vocab lists from stuff I read and when I was confused I wrote down questions that I could ask my teacher about in class to clarify it. I think it is very important for students to learn how to correctly mark up a text that is helpful to them. If students are just highlighting to highlight then they get nothing from the text. Marking a text correctly is also very helpful for when you look back at it to study. This way they can see their thoughts in an organized manner.