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!

Said is Dead

While some times it's a necessary word, I'm close to the point of banning "said" in my classroom.  It's a dead word. It's an overused word.  So I showed my students images and had them come up with more descriptive ways to show dialogue (older post).

Here's our co-created anchor chart:

They've done a much better job at revising their writing for more descriptive terms!

Dialogue

In writing this week, we were working on dialogue and narrative elements.

I wasn't a huge fan of the suggested mentor text from Being a Writer (no offense! I'm just not great at following programs word for word) so I made my own lesson.

We looked at the punctuation marks within our read aloud of The Lightning Thief:

I also pulled a student up to model what this conversation would look like when performed.  Some of my students had great "brain fireworks" as to the connection between literature and plays.

From there, we did a few quick writes based on images.

The third was the Manning Brothers before a Pro Bowl game:

They did such a great job with creating their own dialogue to go along with the images!

Happy writing :)