Interactive Writing in the Primary Grades

Mar 24, 2015
4 min read

My last post was about how to reach those very early writers, you know the ones that write a string of meaningless letters. One of the things that I talked about being crucial to helping those young writers along was a process called Interactive Writing. I want to dig a little deeper into that process and give you some tips on how to implement this in a way that is beneficial to your students. First, remember that this can be done whole class or in small groups. I always used it whole class at first and transitioned to small group once most of my class was ready for more independent writing. If you're not familiar with interactive writing, here is a quick overview:

Interactive writing is a process where the teacher and the student write a story together, with the students and the teacher sharing the writing pen. Your students should have a shared experience, such as a field trip or class experiement. Remember, though that it doesn't have to be as elaborate as that. Some things my class wrote about were what we do at recess, what we do in first grade, what we do at birthday parties, how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.....the possibilities are endless. However, the topic must be something that all of your students know about or can relate to. You will need: an easel, large chart handwriting paper, markers, and oops tape. (Oops tape is simply a roll of white tape - any brand - that you can use to cover up any mistakes your students make while writing. You can place it over the mistake and they can write on top of the tape to correct their error.)

1. Students come up and sit on the rug around the easel.

2. As a class, come up with a topic and a title.

3. Decide what you will write today. One thing I cannot stress enough is to keep it short, no more than five to ten minutes. It goes without saying that you cannot write your whole story in one day. I made that mistake the first time I did this with first graders and it was a complete disaster. My first graders got bored and ended up rolling around the rug and running around the room. Not good. I have found that one sentence a day is plenty. The first day you want to guide your students to write a topic sentence. I always liked "Let me tell you about....." and "Have you ever wondered about.......?"

4. After we decided what to write, I would have them repeat the sentence at least three times, holding up a finger for each word. My purpose of this was two-fold. First, I wanted them to remember what they were writing. Second, I wanted them to know how many words were in the sentence. You would be surprised how many of your students do not know the difference between letters, words, and sentences.

5. Once you have established what you are going to write, it is time to actually write. Focus on one word at a time, leading students to hear sounds in the words and use the sounds to write. Of course not all words can be sounded out so you will also be teaching other strategies. Below are some prompts I used with my students. It is by no means exhaustive.

What do you hear at the beginning of the word?
What do you hear next?
What do you hear at the end of the word?
What two letters can we put together to make that sound?
Is that vowel sound long or short?
Is that letter tall or short?
Where do we begin writing?
Do you have your finger space?
Where can we look for help? (You can guide your students to use the word wall, your alphabet chart, etc. to help them.)
Does that look right?
Does that sound right?
Are we finished?
What goes at the end?

6. One of the skills that I teach while going through this process is letter formation. A lot of my first grade students came to me not knowing the correct way to form letters. I would let them practice this at the bottom of the page before trying it in the passage if I thought they needed it. Remember to keep your oops tape handy for any mistakes.

7. To finish the process, I always have my students choral read whatever we wrote that day. I reveiw what we learned, such as finger spaces, how to write a certain letter correctly, or a skill such as short a.

It is important to remember that you can teach any skill while going through this process. For example, if your language skill for the week is nouns then while writing your passage talk about the nouns in your passage. You can always go back at the end and have your students circle all the nouns. This can help with time management because you can use this not only as your writing lesson, but your skill mini-lesson also.

You always want to follow this process up by giving your students time to write independently through a Writer's Workshop. I will go through that process on a different post.

I hope this has helped you in some way. Go to my facebook page and leave your thoughts and feedback. Thanks for reading and happy teaching!

BELOW IS AN EXAMPLE OF ONE OF MY STUDENT'S WRITING IN AUGUST, JANUARY AND THEN MAY. You can see the progress over time. I did Interactive Writing with the student most every day with this student while he was in my classroom. It really works!