"I say, we say!"
We always start our writing workshop with a mini lesson either on grammar, techniques of writing or punctuation.
Today's mini lesson is on speech marks. The children are starting to use a lot of dialogue in their writing and it was time to teach them how to do that correctly.
We started by finding examples of speech in books. All of us could locate the dialogues and talk about how that meant exactly what the person was saying. We looked for samples where the speech ended with a full stop or a comma. The children realised that in instances where the speech did not end with an exclamation or question mark, we would add a comma if we were to add 'he/she/I said' after the speech.
There is definitely a lot to remember but we will keep reviewing the rules and looking at various examples from books we read.
The children are getting really good at monitoring their writing. They use our 'where are you now branch' to help me know which part of the writing process they are at. Once they are at conferencing, I will call them to the carpet and work with them through what they have written.
