Teaching Speech Marks

Our current focus for writing at the moment is recording speech marks correctly in our writing.  Most of the students were picking this up really well, but some of my lower writers were really struggling with knowing where and when to record the speech mark. To help support them with this we have been practicing knowing when to write in the speech marks using the mouth pegs.

I have been recording sentences on the board and purposely left out the speech marks.  The group then had to work together to recognize which words are being spoken aloud and then the students to use the "lips clothespins" to denote the beginning and end of the quotation.

The kids had fun adding the lips, and it wasn't long before the students began to recognize when to use quotation marks!