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.

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

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

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.

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

COMPOSE

structure

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

SCRIBE

EXPERIENCE

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

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

REVIEW

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

Class decides on their purpose for writing

WHY

EXTEND

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

procedure

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

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

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

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

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

Word Wall

materials and text for interactive writing

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

Notebooks or whiteboards

Chart Paper or SMART Board

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

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.

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 take the pen

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

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.