Teaching Dialogue with Picture Prompts

I recently saw a {post by Jivey} in which she shared an activity where her students wrote a caption for high-interest pictures. Since we were working on writing dialogue, I thought that I could tweak it a bit!

First, I showed them the pictures that would be the topic of the dialogue.

Then we brainstormed a list of words that we could use instead of "said" for each picture. For one with bears, they suggested roared, slurped, yelped, and gulped. For the puppies, barked, whimpered, growled. They didn't have to stick to these words, but I told them that I shouldn't see "said" more than once.

Then I passed out paper to make a four-flap foldable. They were to write what one person/animal said on the flap, then another person's/animal's response under the flap.

I posted the pictures around the room and called students (to avoid a huge rush) to go by the one they wanted to do. I gave them about ten minutes to work on the dialogue.

After the ten minutes, we came back and shared our dialogues.

"This is what happens when you mimic us," tweeted the bird on top.

"I'm sorry. I take it back!" squawked the dangling bird.

"Hmm... let me think about it," chirped the bird on top.

"No time to think, just help!" commanded the falling bird.

"Should we help him?" asked the bird on top.

"Please, just hold out a talon," murmured the falling bird.

"Learn how to fly," stammered the bird on top.

"Great idea!" panted the dangling bird.

On a side note, we have a LOT of work to do on spelling and punctuation, but they had really great ideas :) You can find links to these pictures and several others that I used for this activity on my Pinterest board below. 

Click to visit my board!