Said is Dead

Upon flipping through old posts, I found that almost exactly a year ago, I blogged about a "said is dead" lesson in my classroom.  I just delivered the lesson again in my classroom this year.  However, revising for better words for "said" is a lesson nearly 100% of the fifth graders need.

This year, I made some tweaks.  I paired this mini-lesson with another mini-lesson on dialogue and quotation marks.  This was a logical pairing that just took me a few years to figure out.

While I suggested this lesson idea at grade level planning, another teacher actually made the plans for it.  I was a little bummed when the plans turned out to be a piece of paper for them to glue into their notebooks.  

So I made my own plan and my kids did really well with it!

We glued the resource into our notebooks, but after we'd make lists together. I gave each team a different emotion or tone (happy, sad, angry, loud) to have them generate lists.  I then showed a few different images, like this one:

to have them create a dialogue between the characters (thus using the dialogue mini-lessons and quotation marks) and to replace said with more descriptive language.  

They did a free write for few minutes, then shared the words they used instead of said, which I recorded on the board.  They then shared their writing with a neighbor.

I like when they get so excited about what we're learning!  Although due to their excitement and chatter, we were a minute or so late getting out the door...oops!