Plan a Story Scene Told Mostly in Dialogue

Read the story aloud in different voices so your child hears who is talking. Then have them point to the quotation marks and the speaker tag in each line before writing their own.

Read a made-up model about planting sunflowers, then plan a lemonade stand scene with a 4 turn talk strip and speaker tags. A scene is one moment in a story, told with dialogue. The directions on the page read: Read the model. Read the topic. Then, fill in the 2 friend boxes, the problem and how it ends. Then, write the 4 turns in the talk strip, each with a speaker tag. Then, use your plan to write your draft on lined paper.

Yes, both. We made it for 3rd Grade narrative writing, and the page works the same whether it lands on a kitchen table or a center rotation. At home, most families go through it together and talk the answers out loud, and that talking is where most of the learning happens with writing dialogue. In class it runs well as independent work while you pull a small group. Print one copy or thirty, whichever the day needs.

A speaker tag is the part of a sentence that names who is talking, like said Maya or asked Leo. In the picnic story on Who Is Talking?, some lines have a tag and some do not, so children use the sentence around a line to find the speaker.

Put the exact spoken words inside quotation marks. A comma, question mark or exclamation point goes inside the closing mark, then the tag follows, as in "Can I carry the basket?" asked Leo.

Choose two characters and decide how each one talks, then name the problem and how it ends. The lemonade stand planner gives four turns in a talk strip, so the two friends take turns speaking before the draft.

Two of the 3 sheets do, including Who Is Talking? Find the Speaker in a Story. The scene planner has no key, since every scene is different.