Oh my GOSH, We’re ALL SQUASH!

We’ve been struggling with dialogue. And quotation marks.

And when I say struggling, I mean FALLING FLAT ON OUR FACES.

So, I did what any good blogger-friendly teacher would do. I turned to Google Reader. Thank goodness for Google Reader.

I found 2 things that were REALLY helpful:
 
This post by Dots-N-Spots.

Dots-N-Spots’ original display

It reminded me of the perfect book for that transition time between Halloween and Thanksgiving.

So we read The Ugly Pumpkin. (If you don’t have, you seriously need to add it to your classroom library.) Every time I get to the line “Oh my GOSH, I’m a SQUASH!” I die laughing. I giggled just now thinking about it. 🙂

The 2nd thing I found was a set of thinking “cues” for their writing. And, for the life of me I cannot find the post. So if this is your idea and I didn’t give you credit, I’m sorry and thank you. It worked.

The prompt is to ask the kids 2 questions: WHO said it? WHAT did they say?

If the student can identify those two parts, then they know where to put the quotation marks.

So here is our GOURD-geous garden. They are pretty durn cute squash if you ask me. 🙂

We had so much fun making these! The kids have been rereading The Ugly Pumpkin over and over during their Read to Self time…. We just started Daily 5, BTW.

Holy Moses. That’s a whole post all in itself. 🙂