A Good Writing Minilesson

This year, I have tried to be more intentional with my writing instruction. My students wrote a lot last year, and they certainly improved–some by a lot–but I wasn’t sure what I had actually taught them.

So, I planned my narrative unit more intentionally this year. I started with a week of writing first drafts, and then we dove into the revision process by learning a lot of different strategies.

Now, we’re in the editing stage of our final small moment narrative draft. Today, we talked about dialogue. I knew that some of my students included it in their pieces and that they understood the basic structure of dialogue, but I saw this as a place where we could make a big impact by looking at the punctuation and paragraphing of writing dialogue.

As I often do, I turned to a picture book to use as a mentor text.

Not only does this book include many examples of well-written dialogue, it is funny and includes hilarious idioms that were fun to discuss with my students.

We created a list of guidelines for including dialogue in our writing, starting with what we already knew and adding more as we read the book.

I feel like this was a good lesson. They learned something practical to use in their writing, it will make their writing a little more polished, and it was fun to do a bonus read aloud.