Interactive Writing

What is Interactive Writing?

Interactive writing is a collaborative teaching/learning strategy in which teacher and students jointly compose and write texts. Not only do they share the decision about what they are going to writing, they also share the duties of the scribe. The teacher uses the interactive writing session to model reading and writing strategies as he or she engages children in creating texts. It is particularly powerful in Kindergarten and Year 1 classrooms and it supports both the writing and reading processes.

Why include Interactive Writing into your daily timetable?

Interactive writing allows students to:

Work together co-operatively, learning from each other, while being supported by the teacher. Develop and practise phonemic awareness skills recording sounds in sequence.

Practise the conventions of print

See the connections between what we write and read

Practise rereading their writing in order to develop it further

Practise use of high frequency words

Search, check and confirm while reading and writing

Learn story structure and components, beginning, middle, end, characters, plot and setting

Interactive Writing allows teachers to

Teach children how to move from spoke to written language

Teach children to be strategies in their independent writing so know what to do when they don’t know how to writing something

Show the connections they see between knowledge of high frequency words into actual process of writing so they learn how to use the item knowledge

Stimulus for Interactive writing comes from any topic

Retelling a story

Recounting a group experience

Retelling a student’s news

Writing a letter/report/description

Describing a class experiment

Writing about their maths lesson for their maths journal

Creating labels for artwork

How do you do Interactive Writing?

Interactive writing should be done on chart paper (or newspaper print) or an IWB so that it can be kept and reread

The group decided on the text to be written. The teacher will say, “Tell me about…,” and encourages the students to speak to their thinking partners about the topic. The teacher then says, “What can we write about…?” This is negotiated and then repeated several times before it is written. If the writing is building on from a previous session, this needs to be reread first. (A piece of writing may take several days to complete).

Every time a new word is added, the group rereads the message from the beginning, whilst the teacher is pointing to the words. It is helpful to encourage children to ‘read it to make sure it makes sense and sounds right,’ and early on it is also a good idea to say, ‘read it with your finger to see what word we need to write next.’ This gives the students a strategy to use when they are writing independently.

Students take turns to be the scribe. Both the teacher and the students share the pen. The teacher may decide that they need to learn where to put spaces so will get the student to come and work out where to put the next word.

Students take turns writing the words or parts of the word. This will depend on what the teacher wishes to focus on, ie sight words, letters, sounds, spaces between words, capital letters, punctuation, directionality.

Other students may be writing on mini whiteboards.

Any errors can be covered with masking tape

Hear and recording sounds in words

The teacher may ask the group to say the word slowly and then say what they can hear at the beginning, middle or end of the word. The teacher can write the ‘tricky’ part of the words. This will help the students to learn what to do when they want to write a word, and it will change over time depending of where they are on the continuum.

Learning a High Frequency or Sight Word

If there is a high frequency word in the sentence that has not been added to the ‘class word wall, ’ this can be added. The students can also use mini whiteboards to learn the new word by writing it, rubbing it out, writing it, rubbing it out over and over.

Use environmental print

The teacher may know that there is a word on the word wall that can be used, so they may ask one student to find it on the word wall, another to find it in the dictionary.

Syllabification

The teacher may get the students to clap the syllables of a word to show them a strategy they can use when they are writing independently.

Use analogy to write new words

When the students have a good bank of know words, the teacher can show the children how to use analogy to write new words. The group may need to write the word stay. If they know how to write day (locate on the calendar) the students can use magnetic letters or mini whiteboard to change the onset.

How long should the Interactive Writing lesson go for?

With the younger students it is important to keep the lessons short with only 1 or 2 focus areas. Five minutes is long enough. As they can write more the lessons can become longer. The focus of the lessons are to teach the students writing strategies which they can use independently. Independent writing should follow the lessons on the same topic

At the end of the writing the students reread to check that it makes sense, sounds write and looks right.

The writing need to be readable and have the correct spelling. It can then be displayed in the classroom for students to read and as a model for writing.

https://www.csu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/1158442/Interactive-Writing.pdf