Dialogue!

Wow. It has been WAY TOO LONG since I have blogged.  The holidays all the way from October to December were quite busy.  I did a lot of the same projects that I blogged about last year.

This past week I taught my class about dialogue.  I thought I would share some of the things we did.  I started off by talking about what dialogue was.  Following that i went through a Prezi that I made about dialogue (If you are not a Prezi user, you should be.  I love it SO much more than PowerPoint.  One of the best things is that it is easy to insert a YouTube video into a Prezi presentation and there are no adds on it).

We started with the "First Day of School" clip from the movie Finding Nemo.
We talked about how it is pretty easy to determine who is speaking when we are watching a movie.

Then we looked at the "bread in the toaster" comic from Calvin and Hobbes. 
We talked about how we could determine who as talking in the comic.

After that I showed the students a couple of pages from a book that I had recently read to them.  We talked about how you could tell when a character was talking by looking for quotation marks.  I read the pages without paying attention to the quotation marks and then again with paying attention to them.  I had the students explain to me which way they liked better and why.

After that we looked at one more clip from the read aloud book that I am currently reading.  We talked about telling sentences and talking sentences and tried to determine which sentences were telling ones and which ones were talking.

We practiced writing dialogue by writing back and forth with a partner on a whiteboard.  I had the students make sure that they were using quotation marks and practicing that as they did this activity.

Next we rolled two of these dice (the ones that have characters listed on them) to help us come up with some different combinations of characters that we could write a dialogue between.  The kids loved rolling the dice (I picked up the wooden blocks at Hobby Lobby for 99 cents a piece and then painted them and wrote on them).  I wrote the combinations up on the board to get them thinking, but let them know that they could write a dialogue between any two people or characters they wanted.

The final thing I had my students do was to write a dialogue between two people or characters on a piece of lined paper.  They then had to glue the dialogue onto a piece of construction paper and build a story around it.  This first one is my example.  Below it are some of the ones my kiddos did, most of them did a pretty good job.

 (This is a pretty realistic conversation that happens almost daily with this student. haha)

Life is good in Second Grade!  Hopefully I will post more in the near future!

Miss Paul