If you really want to get a lot of ‘bang for your buck’ with your emergent and early writers and readers, then I highly recommend that you try out interactive writing with your students. As a former kindergarten teacher, it was staple practice in my classroom, a practice that led to eager, avid and independent writers. So many skills are taught and reinforced through the practice of interactive writing; concept of words, conventions of print, the sounds in words and how the sounds connect to letters, spelling patterns, sentence composition, punctuation, letter formation and a sense of the class as a community of writers.

If interactive writing is a new term for you, here is a brief definition of this practice: Interactive writing is a cooperative event in which
 teacher and children jointly compose and write text. Not only do they share the decision about what they
 are going to write, they also share the duties of 
scribe.

The process begins with the teacher and students planning and composing text. The purpose is authentic and meaningful; the planning is done through lots and lots of talk and is guided by the teacher. The pen is then shared as students stretch out words, listen for sounds and represent those sounds with letters on the paper. The students contribute what they know and then the teacher fills in the rest.

The writing can take many forms; a list, for example, if you are working on the sounds “y” and “w”, you can create an two column chart and have students brainstorm and interactively write words that fit in each column, a letter, one kindergarten class that I work in wrote a thank you note to some community volunteers, a diagram–see Frosty below, a rewrite of a big book, and on and on and on.

All you really need to implement interactive writing in the classroom is an easel, some chart paper, 2 different colored markers (one color for the teacher and one color for the students), corrective tape, the alphabet chart you use and an authentic purpose for writing.

Once the writing is done, it becomes text that all students can revisit and reread and take pride in knowing that they were one of the contributing authors!

“Frosty” is interactive writing done by kindergarten students at Shoreham Elementary School who were tired of this funny-no snow-winter and so took it upon themselves to create their own snowman, inside their classroom!

Here are a few more tried and true ideas for interactive writing to get you started. If you give interactive writing a try, please share your ideas here on the blog and remember to take a photo!

• Nursery rhymes are great – you can “fill” Mother Hubbard’s cupboard with magazine cut outs of food and then label them with interactive writing
• Winter rewrite of Rosie’s Walk – “around the snowman, down the ski slope, over the frozen pond, etc.
• An on-going list of ‘signs of spring’
• Rules or expectations at a new learning center
• Valentine’s Day Card to the Principal
• Directions for how to make something…like a snowman or an edible treat.
• An extension from a read aloud – “What did Goldilocks learn?”

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