The first six weeks of back-to-school are filled with getting to know students, testing, and figuring out our classroom routines. When we get into the second marking period, I always notice a shift in how my classroom does its business. There is a movement from the “getting to know you phase” to the “we can finally start learning and growing phase” each year. This phase takes place right around the six-week mark and involves focusing more on content than on routines and expectations. I look forward to this transition each year. I want to take a moment to pause and acknowledge the first skill that I teach students every school year is always the same: annotation in reading. I use non-fiction reading to implement this strategy because it establishes a routine for the rest of the year when we encounter a nonfiction text, and it transitions nicely to when we are dealing with larger works of fiction. In the past, I have done Article of the Week from Kelly Gallagher to teach annotation skills, but I am finding that online learning is causing me to adapt to a new way to teach annotation while online. Annotation is a brand new skill for middle-schoolers. In this post, I will outline how I go about teaching annotation skills, providing purpose for annotation, and how to keep mixing it up to keep kids interested.

I wanted to review one of Kelly Gallagher's strategies called Article of the Week that has changed the game of teaching for me. I have tried every method of homework under the sun in the past 9 years. I have tried homework menus, homework assigned on certain days, daily five homework, grammar homework, reading homework, writing homework...and the list goes on. The main method of homework that works for my students and that remains genuine is Gallagher's Article of the Week. The Article of the Week or AOW incorporates the addition of useful non-fiction resources into the classroom, and also provides students with a method of increasing their reading performance and knowledge base. Students are taught skills and purpose with annotation.  I like to assign a new focus for each trimester while doing an AOW.

One of the biggest pieces of advice that I give to new teachers is to always be prepared. Not just the regular "I have got a plan prepared," but the "I have a plan and 2 backup plans just in case this whole thing goes to the birds" type of prepared. The term "systems" always has sounded fancy to me, but the instructional routines, expectations, and actual structures that are in place in any classroom dictate the quality of the learning environment and level of success regarding classroom management. Simply, the routines of how we do business in the day-to-day in my classroom impacts learning on all levels. I have a type of organized process for many things...and then for some things I don't. After coming to terms with the paper problem, I wanted to start by reviewing the systems I have in place so that I can take on the school year in the fall ready to give high-quality feedback in a high quantity without going completely insane.