Characters Come To Life Through Dialogue In Mrs. McGuire's Class

Last week Mrs. McGuire’s class discussed how in a story, dialogue is the words characters say. Dialogue helps the reader imagine what the characters are like and how they act. Together, the class created a list of "speaker's tags" that can make the story more interesting instead of repeating tags such as "he said, she said". Students also discussed the use of punctuation and quotation marks. On day one, the class looked closely at a pre-written dialogue and identified the speaker's tags, the use of quotation marks and punctuation. On day two, together students brainstormed a dialogue and wrote a story as a class. On day three pictures were added.  The task was to work collaboratively to write a dialogue between two friends who were having a disagreement. The children worked together to brainstorm a dialogue, they shared the pen, and "performed" their dialogue for the class. Every child participated in one aspect or another. Now students are working on dialogues individually.