Adding Dialogue to create Tone in your writing!

Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Lately, we have been working on adding dialogue to narrative writing.  SO, I thought I would share with you a short activity that I made that the students can put into their interactive writing notebooks as a reference tool for creating dialogue.
The first thing I did was assess the student's knowledge of dialogue by asking them to write a conversation that they had recently with their parent.  This gave me a good glance at their overall knowledge!
Next, we talked about was how writers actually use dialogue as a "strategy" to achieve different goals while they are writing.  After students thought about dialogue as a strategy, they worked together in pairs to think of why writers use dialogue and what they are hoping to achieve. See the picture below for the great ideas my students came up with! 
My goal for the lesson was to show students that using dialogue in writing can help the author to create tone in their writing. Tone was a tricky topic for my students! Thankfully, one of my students made the connection that someone's tone of voice tells you how they are feeling so this really helped their understanding! We discussed how dialogue actually creates tone to your story because it gives you more insight to how a character is acting and feeling.  

To step up the "rigor" I also used the flower below to help the students visualize different speaker tags that could strengthen their dialogue and tone in their stories.  They came up with some amazing words! Using the thesaurus helped alot. Download all of these materials by clicking HERE or on any of the photos!
Do you have any tips for teaching dialogue?

2 comments:

  1. Thank you, this will be really helpful with my students!

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  2. Great ideas, my third grader's teacher just said he needs to work on adding dialogue to his stories. I am looking up ideas to help him with his summer writing goals. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

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