What Are They Saying? Using Children's Picture Books to Practice Writing

Purpose:  Do you have children’s picture books in your classroom or laying around your house? Here’s a fun idea of how they can be used to practice writing with adults!

Preparation Time:  5 minutes

Materials Needed:  Post-it notes, children’s books with characters (for literacy level learners, pictures of people will be easiest)

Procedure:

1. Display a picture from a children’s book that features a character.
2. Ask the learners to look at the picture and brainstorm suggestions of what the character could be saying. Encourage them to focus on what they see in the picture around the character, not the words.
3. Draw a speech bubble on a post-it note and write one of the suggestions in the bubble. Post it on the page. Demonstrate a few more pages as needed.
4. Put learners into pairs or groups of three. Give each group a picture book and post it notes.
5. Have the learners work together to create speech bubbles for the characters in the book.
6. Groups can switch books and read each other’s dialogues.

Modification for Teaching Online: Use the screen sharing option and annotation tool to demonstrate writing the speech bubble, or share a word or google document that you can edit. For the independent work, put up a picture and have learners write their sentences in the chat.

Find more great suggestions for using children’s picture books at https://righttoreadproject.com/2021/06/19/what-do-i-do-with-all-these-predictable-books/?fbclid=IwAR2fpqy_9PcRsckuKgrbuhaPIe78IXQ-pkpZFkrY3K-B3OPB4Tvae7s48QI

Thank you to the Right to Read Project for this wonderful idea!

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