Kim Essenburg serves with Christian Reformed World Missions by teaching English 10 at Christian Academy in Japan. Kim shares about the power of using a bookmark:

I’m excited about a bookmark. Why? Because I’ve found a simple, effective tool for preparing students for a Biblical perspective assessment.

At the start of my English 10 unit on Ellie Wiesel’s Night (a Holocaust memoir), I gave each of my students a bookmark. On the bookmark are the unit:

• Assessment (essay, 750-1000 words): How significant a part of what’s wrong with the world is the tendency to disregard the human dignity of others, and how should a Christian respond? Illustrate your answer from literature, history, current events, and your own experience. Be sure to address the relevance of the Biblical concepts of the image of God and the second greatest commandment.
  
• Key vocabulary, including: fascist, deportation, Aryan, emaciated, annihilate, apathy, and vulnerable.
  
• Key reading strategies, including: accessing background knowledge, drawing inferences, and synthesizing information.

I use the bookmark:

• To introduce the unit and the assessment.
  
• When giving reading assignments. I remind students to look at the bookmark for vocabulary and for reading strategies related to the reading assignment, and I encourage them to journal about the assigned reading with the assessment in mind.
  
• At the start of the next day. I use the bookmark to review appropriate vocabulary, point out places where certain reading strategies would have been helpful, and review the day’s reading assignment in the context of the assessment.

I want my students to do well on the unit assessment. I really want them to be able to apply a Biblical perspective to mistreatment of people. The bookmark helps me focus on preparing my students for the assessment and helps my students learn with the end in mind.