Heartfelt Conversations

Looking for a quick writing activity to help teach dialogue? Dawn Beach (sixth grade teacher at River Forest Elementary) has a great idea! She utilizes the seasonal conversational hearts to give students practice with punctuating dialogue. After being given a handful of candy hearts, students need to create a dialogue between characters using the messages on the hearts. Use this to teach students that every dialogue exchange should include quotation marks around ONLY the words spoken by the character.

Here's a brief anchor paper example to show students ahead of time:
"Miss you," she whispered from across the aisle of desks.
"UR kind," he whispered back, a little annoyed.
"Be mine?" she said, with a little question in her voice.
"Whatever!" he replied, sarcastically.
"Love you," she tried again.
"Get real!" he huffed and got up from his desk.