At the risk of sounding Austenesque, good MG writers vary their speech tags quite a bit. It's a big difference between MG and YA, where speech tags tend to be left off altogether and the reader is assumed to be more "responsible" for following speakers in text.
This is a blogpost, from a NaNoWriMo 2018 sponsor, that covers just about everything you need to know about using dialogue tags.
While a good ole "he said" or "she said" is frequently (a majority of the time) called for, a speech tag can also convey movement or emotion. Just don't use the same one, over and over, unless you have a reason.
In my WIP, originally my MC "cried" a lot. There were buckets of tears. Ugh. Not at all what I was going for.
Next, he "staggered" quite a bit. Really? He had 300 pages to find his feet! C'mon.
In most cases, a simple Find and Replace can fix your problems.
I write about animals, so I can use the more melodramatic ones, like snarled and hissed and clawed. Dragons snarl and hiss and claw. But unless you're writing about top predators, save these and use sparingly, for dramatic effect.
I recently read an author who overused "blinked." I started blinking, while reading!
I compiled a list of a few, quite a few, really, and used them -- maybe once, each? Some not at all, she cried. ;-)
