Teaching Dialogue

When teaching dialogue, I like to use Noticings. I give students excerpts with dialogue and ask them what they notice about the quotation marks, punctuation, and capitalization. They they help to create the rules for writing dialogue.

The Plato Author's Techniques lesson continues with a brief discussion of dialogue. For my adaptation, students used noticings to develop the rules for writing dialogue. We then used printable comics at Make Beliefs Comix to practice writing dialogue that fits a certain mood in the text. While comics aren't typically punctuated like dialogue, we practiced using the dialogue rules in our comics.

Students were encouraged to create their own comics on the Make Beliefs Comix website using the same rules and their own moods after completion of the class lesson.

Students created dialogue with printable comic strips.

Symbolism and Mood Pyramids

The grade 7 author's techniques lessons continued with a study of symbolism and mood. Students reviewed symbolism and had to create a Mood Pyramid. Students chose a mood from a class list. They then had to think about what object, action, people, and setting most represent that mood. Students filled in the sides of their pyramids with images that represented each studying both mood and symbolism.

I have modified the online Plato course curriculum many times. The Author's Technique lesson is a worksheet that includes definitions and short answer responses for each. Instead of using that worksheet, I am using more interactive materials to teach the same concepts. Check back for info on the dialogue and description section of the Plato worksheet!

Student Mood Pyramids. 

Where the Wild Things Are Literary Analysis

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak may be a childhood classic, but it is also a great teaching tool for inferences and literary analysis. A few years ago, the book was adapted into a terrific film. I used both the film and the book to create a compare and contrast unit that asked students to study the images, write a movie review, and compare and contrast the original text with the film version. My middle schoolers loved the movie which kept them engaged throughout the lesson. Below you will find a google folder with the materials that I used including print outs of the slides that were shown on the SmartBoard during the lesson.

Where the Wild Things Are Unit

** This unit is from when I worked at an alternative school with a transient student population. Each day, new students joined the class and old students left the class. This resulted in modifications to assignments for students based on when they entered the class. Sadly, we never got to complete the Create Your Own "Wild Thing" Project which was to be an Art/English activity that created a 3D wild thing using varying supplies with a biography of the Wild Thing and a revised Where the Wild Things Are to include the new Wild Thing. By the time we got to that lesson, the majority of the students in the class had not participated in the earlier lessons, so we moved on. But someday....