Annotating Tell-tale Heart with Struggling Readers

Here's a fun assignment.  We were reading "Tell-tale Heart" and I had a hard time getting students to write their annotations down - the standard unwillingness to put the words on the page.  So I ran a basic reading and annotating lesson - the startup with a question asking them to review an idea from an earlier piece of the text, followed by a group reading and annotation of the short paragraph you can see in this picture.  Then, I moved into the 15 minute reading and annotating portion, where students read for content and answer a question.  But, I threw in a twist.  The student with the most correct annotations and a good answer to the question got a 6 out of 5 for the day.  It was a competition.  This is what I got from the winner, a girl who hadn't annotated more than 4 sentences on her own previously.  

The nice thing about this particular exercise for struggling readers is that it shows them exactly how much meaning they can make from a text that is otherwise above their heads (they think).  It isn't as if quantity of writing is the only thing that matters; one the contrary, students' main struggle is often to write something that they feel is truly valid.  "I don't want to just say the same thing" is a comment second only to "I know what it means, but I just can't say it."  If nothing else, writing this much illustrates that she was able to say a lot about the text without (if you look closely) much deviation from the literal meaning on the page.  After all, reading what's right there is the first thing when acquiring overall literacy.