Our Fox: Correcting Character Conversations activity is based on the picture book, Fox by Australian author Margaret Wild. It allows students to demonstrate their understanding of dialogue. The science of reading has proven that teaching syntax concepts, such as dialogue conventions, helps improve students’ reading and writing.

Students will require some prior knowledge of dialogue conventions to complete this task, as they are required to add missing quotation marks, capital letters and other forms of punctuation to excerpts of conversation between characters from the text. Students are encouraged to keep track of their editing by tallying their corrections as they go.

To cater for the various needs of students in your class, we have included four versions of this resource:

• Version 1 includes quotes that require corrections with a different colour.
• Version 2 includes quotes that need to be rewritten correctly.
• Version 3 includes the beginning of an imaginary conversation that requires students to make corrections with a different colour and write the next part of the conversation below.
• Version 4 is best suited to confident writers as it requires students to compose a conversation between two characters that is based on a prompt.