Extending Interactive Writing
Into Grades 2-5
Brooke Ohnmeis
Section B
9/8/15
Main Idea
Interactive writing is an instructional method where teacher and student utilize the steps of the writing process to create a meaningful text of any genre. Group collaboration in composing writing through guided writing and "sharing the pen" technique but students do all the writing. There is six essential parts of an interactive writing lesson: experience, prewrite, compose, share the pen, review and extend. Prewrite consist of who the target audience is. Compose is gathering everyone's ideas and might use think- alouds to model appropriate sentences. Share the pen is when students actually compose sentences and as a class edits them. Review is when the teacher throws in a mini lesson to review with the students of sentence structure, vocabulary, etc. Extend is when the interactive writing project is hung on the wall as a reference for the students. Interactive writing can also we done by typing or keyboarding. Interactive writing needs to be fast paced and demands high level of engagement from the students. The end goal of interactive writing is to teach students strategies about writing that they can use themselves.
Reflection
I think this article is beneficial for all teachers. This article goes into great detail on how, when, where, and why interactive writing is useful. It showed good details of each part of the writing process and how to guide your students to success. I think interactive writing is a great way to work as a class on writing skills. I have seen this strategy used in a 3rd grade classroom and it was very effective. This strategy is definitely geared towards upper grades such as 2nd-5th grade but could be used in maybe a kindergarten or 1st grade classroom with a lot of guided help from the teacher. Overall I believe this is a great technique that I will be using in my future classroom!
Questions
- Have you personally seen interactive writing in the classroom? If so, when and where did you see it?
- What are two benefits using this strategy?
- What downfalls are there to this strategy?
- How can interactive writing be used in other subject?
Bibliography
Roth, K., & Dabrowski, J. (2014). Extending Interactive Writing Into Grades 2-5. Read Teach The Reading Teacher, 33-44.