Your Students Will Love This Speech Bubble Writing Prompt
I know 2 things about writing instruction:
- Students will write better (quality) and longer (duration) when they are writing about someone/something of interest.
- Teachers are always looking for engaging writing prompts for their students.
In this post I am offering a writing prompt that is both simple and versatile. Speech bubble writing asks students to fill in dialogue for a familiar person or character.
You have a couple of options. You can cut out paper speech bubble shapes for students to write on or you can use Microsoft Word or PowerPoint to draw the bubbles. If your student would rather use a keyboard, use text boxes to allow her or him to type their responses.
If you don’t know how to create the bubbles in Word & PowerPoint, this video will help:
Your expectations for a student’s writing sample will depend on age, developmental writing level, and learning objective. You may choose for a student to focus on critical thinking, vocabulary, or punctuation. Or, you may choose to allow students to enjoy an opportunity for free writing.
Extension Ideas:
1) Print photos of familiar people and ask students to complete a speech ot thought bubble such as My teacher always says…., If my mom were here right now she would say…, My friend is probably thinking…
2) If you are teaching point-of-view, pair students up and ask them to each discuss an opposing viewpoint of a topic. Each student could then use a thought bubble to summarize the partner’s thoughts in a word, phrase, or sentence.
3) Add dialogue or thoughts to wordless books.
4) Allow students to create comic books that feature dialogue.
5) Print pictures of historical figures that you are studying or characters from a book you are reading and ask students to capture what the figure may be thinking.
Here is the most important part of the lesson- publishing.
Always allow your students to share what they have written. This can be accomplished by asking them to read their work to the class, hanging the writing samples in a prominent place in your classroom, or creating a book or slideshow that features everyone’s work. If you create a book of your students’ writing samples, be sure to place it in your classroom’s self-selected reading library.
Be sure to check out the video below for some additional thoughts and ideas.
