Punctuating dialogue is hard...even for adults. Most sixth graders still string together quotes, one right after another, in a dialogue choo choo train.
This
hands-on activity from
Miss Nannini on Teachers Pay Teachers helped my students a TON when we studied quotation marks in our punctuation unit.
I copied and laminated six sets of the sentence strips on different colored paper...one set per group.
Then the students (2-3 per group) arrange the quotes, the dialogue tags, and the punctuation marks on the floor.
After awhile, they figured out they could leave the punctuation in place and just plug in different quotes and dialogue tags.
Once they created ten sentences, they copied the sentences into their S.T.A.R. notebooks. I've seen drastic improvement in the dialogue punctuation since we did this lesson. Definitely worth the time!
