Looking for Some Comic Relief When Teaching Direct and Indirect Speech?

This resource is a great way to motivate students to practise recording dialogue. The use of direct (quoted) and indirect (reported) speech is a tricky writing skill and one that requires lots of repetition to perfect. 

This set of worksheets is designed for individual use. Students are provided with a page containing six comic frames, each depicting dialogue in speech bubbles. There is a corresponding worksheet for each frame. Students convert the dialogue shown in the comic frame into both a direct-speech version and an indirect-speech version. 

In completing the worksheets, students hone their punctuation skills as they place speech marks, commas and full stops in their sentences. There is also the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge of ‘saying verbs’ when they re-write the dialogue. Encourage your students to broaden their vocabulary of synonyms for ‘said’ in their writing.

Scaffold and Extend Your Punctuation Lesson Plans

In addition to individual student work time, use this worksheet as a:

• guided literacy group activity 
• homework assignment
• whole-class review (via smartboard)

Support struggling students by limiting the amount of writing they have to do. They could simply complete either the direct speech version or the indirect speech version rather than doing both. Alternatively, do away with the writing altogether and work orally with the students. Several students could act out the scenarios while one person acts as a narrator.

After completing the worksheets, challenge your fast finishers to choose one of the frames and continue creating their own comic or narrative to match.

Easily Download & Print (Or Go Digital)

The Download button has a dropdown icon, which allows you to choose between the PDF and Google Slides versions of this resource. The Google Slides version has been adapted with preset text boxes for students to type in, just in case you’d like this to be a fully digital learning activity.

Don’t stop there! We’ve got more activities related to direct and indirect speech:  

teaching resource

Writing Out Loud: Dialogue Punctuation Worksheet

Practice using quotation marks in writing with a Punctuating Dialogue worksheet.

teaching resource

Dealing With Direct Speech - Worksheet

Use this worksheet when teaching students the rules for punctuating direct speech.