Tuesday ELA Pods

During Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, our schedule allows us to have a good chunk of time for language arts pods.  On Wednesdays we have the Macs to incorporate tech into our schedule and on Tuesdays we are creative in the various tasks we undertake.

building sentencesn

response to literature questions

detective case reports

irregular past tense verb matching

Using Quotation Marks

We've been taking a close look at quotation marks in class.  Some things we are noticing are how they are written in text (the correct punctuation used), their purpose (to show speaking out loud), and who is speaking.

Today as authors we started to use quotation marks in our own writing.  On Kidblog, we wrote single, independent sentences that used quotations at the beginning or end of the sentence.  Along with this we discussed how the punctuation would change (location and style) if the quote was a statement, question or exclamation.

In doing this, we also "put said to bed" meaning we came up with a variety of other words to use instead of said.  Words that would make our writing more colourful and create better pictures for our readers.  Enjoy!

Using Quotation Marks (Kidblog Link)

"Quotations"

As we read novels, we encounter a lot of dialogue.  Therefore, it's important for students to understand what is dialogue, how it's used, its purpose and how to incorporate it so they can apply it into their own writing.

Today we took a part of a novel and began to analyze the quotation marks.  First, we identified quotation marks and noted that they are used to indicate what a characters says out loud.  Then we noticed that different punctuation is used at the end of dialogue, which is dependent on (a) where the dialogue is located in a sentence, and (b) if the dialogue is an exclamation or a question.  Dialogue sure can be tricky!  We're also working to enhance our understanding of knowing who is speaking the dialogue, when sometimes it doesn't explicitly tell us.