Interactive Writing

Interactive Writing

529x Group Exploration Research ~Fairlight Lieber

What is interactive writing?

Interactive writing is a collaborative teaching/learning strategy in which teacher and students jointly compose and write texts.

This is particularly powerful in primary classrooms as it supports both the writing and reading processes.

The teacher teaches students how to move from spoken to written language

Role of Teacher during interactive writing

The teacher models reading and writing strategies as well as engages the students in creating text.

Role of students during interactive writing

Students not only share the decision about what they are going to write, but also share in the duties of the scribe.

EXTEND

REVIEW

SCRIBE

COMPOSE

WHY

EXPERIENCE

By saving the writing, this becomes a piece of work to revisit as an instructional tool or progress monitoring.

Students share their ideas as teacher synthesizes and proposes how to consolidate them into written text.

Class decides on their purpose for writing

The writing is based on something that everyone has experience with.

structure

When writing is complete, teacher leads group in reviewing the text and emphasizing key points.

Students and teacher share the pen writing letters, words, sentences or punctuation marks.

In order to keep everone engaged, Interactive Writing does not need to take long, anywhere from 5 to 30 min.

The teacher may assist students on where to put spaces between words.

Students take turns being the scribe. The teacher also shares the pen to write tricky parts of a word.

After teacher sparks students' interests, the group negotiates what should be written.

procedure

Every time something new is added, the group rereads the message from the begining to make sure it makes sense.

Students take turns writing the words or parts of the word, depending on what the teacher wishes to focus on.

materials and text for interactive writing

Chart Paper or SMART Board

Since Interactive writing is a visual process, everyone will want to see the group writing so it should be on something large and able to save for reviewing.

Word Wall

Having a student refer to the Word Wall or adding words often occurs during Interactive Writing.

Notebooks or whiteboards

When students are not adding to the group writing, then they are copying the text into their own notebooks or whiteboard.

challenges

English Learners and struggling students who are not yet capable of writing, can still contribute by adding illustrations or "holding a space" for the next word to be written. Teachers could also write a word in pencil and then ask a student to come up and trace the word with their marker.

Resources

Colorful Markers

The teacher may want to have a black marker while students can use different colors.

Students participate by giving the teacher ideas and also assist by writing letters, words, phrases, or sentences with the teacher’s guidance.

Students take the pen

Since this is interactive, should there be invented spelling?

Invented spelling should not be used in Interactive writing since the teacher is facilitating and modeling writing mechanics.

This video shows 1st graders using Interactive Writing which helps students apply their growing knowledge of letter-sound connections to write sentences using familiar spelling patterns and high frequency words in a shared sentence.