Dialogue and Breaking the Fourth Wall

If you're looking for a way to teach punctuating dialogue, it's hard to beat Lee's "Teaching Direct Speech Punctuation using the iPhone text messaging!", which he published nearly five (FIVE) years ago.

Recently, I've been reading books in the following series to both my own children and my class. As someone reading a book out loud, the thing I like it is the way the books talk to their audience and invite them into the narrative.

The reason they're appearing in this post is that they're written as direct speech, with the speech in speech bubbles.

Ideas:

- children look at page or pages in a book and convert the speech bubble(s) into written, punctuated dialogue.

- children create a dialogue between themselves and the book. The books get the reader to think or intimate a response. These could be written down.

- children could write the narrative of the story. Still writing dialogue, but adding actions and descriptions too.

Just a few ideas to get you started...

Edit Your Friend's Facebook Posts

Some of my friends on Facebook and contacts on Twitter write beautifully and accurately, others (like me) have the off (:-)) typo here and there, while others just write with errors all over the place (your/you're - grrr).

This is a post by a friend of mine on his Facebook page. I took a screen capture and asked my class to correct it. We did it as an Exit Ticket activity.

So, spot an awful social media update, copy it, anonymise it, and give it to your class... 

Lynne Truss' Books for Punctuation

I can remember when 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation' was first published. I was at university at the time and a house mate purchased it as a gift for his mother. I had a flick through and found some of the contents of interest. A few years later, and now teaching, I came across the 'child version' of the book. So, I made a purchase and often us the three child-friendly versions of the original in class. Although aimed at children, these books often act as an aide-mémoire for me too!

We've recently been looking at how commas can change the meaning of a sentence. 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves For Children: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference' is ideal for introducing this. After looking at the examples in the book and some of what's in the other two books pictured above, we had a go at writing some of our own:

Click here to see some more of our examples.

More Dice for Writing Exciting Sentences.

We are now trying the next step in our use of dice to support children in their use of Alan Peat 'Exciting Sentences'.

With the Year Six class we work with, we are giving the children, who have all been taught different sentence types over the last three years, a blank cube net as might be found here. The children, who are writing mystery narratives, are going to choose the most relevant and useful sentence types for their piece of writing, The challenge will be to take two dice and merge the two different sentence types into one wonderful sentence of complexity and detail (instead of appsmashing; sentencesmashing).

Whilst we love the way 'exciting sentences' serves as a toolbox for equipping children with different ways of adding sentence structures and punctuation, the ultimate aim is for children to develop a proper understanding of how those sentence structures and different pieces of punctuation work. Then we want them to effectively and appropriately 'break the rules' in order to make their writing more effective.

The purpose of this intermediate stage is to get the children to take a proactive role in choosing which sentence types work best for the text type they are writing and, more importantly, how they go beyond their basic use in making them more effective. For those writers who are confident, we now want to teach them to take risks with their writing and start deliberately breaking rules, from a basis of knowledge, in order to engage the reader.

The children found that some sentences worked more effectively than others. For example an 'if, if, if, then' sentence worked well with 'simile' sentences. It made them think even harder about the effect the words were having on the reader especially when the sentences went wrong. It also demonstrated those children who were learning the sentence types parrot fashion and needed some grammar and punctuation intervention as well as those who had a deeper understanding.

To get started with the 'exciting sentence' types, buy the book here.