Margin Notes

If you are familiar with Jennifer Serravallo’s The Literacy Teacher’s Playbook K-2/ 3-6, you will no doubt have tried some of the many assessment tools she suggests, helping you understand deeply what students know and can do. 

One such assessment tool is called Jot Notes and is used to determine what students understand in their comprehension of text. Jennifer states “what meaning students are making in a text is one of the trickiest parts of assessing reading.” She suggests having students write about, speak about, or answer questions about their reading to make comprehension visible and to allow students’ individual needs by offering a variety of ways in which they respond.  

Jot Notes are a quick and easy way for students to respond. We may ask a student to stop and jot as they read independently or pause during a read aloud at predetermined places and ask students to jot a quick note, reaction, question, reflection, or idea on a sticky note or in their reader’s notebook. For example, if you are assessing the students’ abilities to visualize you may ask them to describe what they are picturing or to assess inference and how characters change over time, you may ask students to describe what kind of a person the character is at the beginning and at the end of the book.  

A tip that teachers have shared with us to help save time is to ask students to label stickies with their name and the date before the read aloud or independent reading, this allows teachers to collect and file them in a students’ reading profile quickly and easily.  

Try this tomorrow! 

Image is page — Literacy Teacher’s Playbook K-2 p22 Heineman