Types of Writing Instruction

Interactive Writing-

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 teacher uses the interactive writing session to model reading and writing strategies as he or she engages children in creating text.

Interactive writing can be used to demonstrate concepts about print, develop strategies, and learn how words work. It provides children with opportunities to hear sounds in words and connect those sounds with corresponding letters. Students are engaged in the encoding process of writing and the decoding process of reading, all within the same piece of text. Interactive writing is a unique opportunity to help children see the relationship between reading and writing.

(Click on a picture below to see an example of our interactive writing.)

Compare story elements(characters, setting, problem, solution) by using story maps.

Use story structure to retell a story and/or use a story structure to mimic the language in a mentor text.

Community Writing-

Community Writing is a term given to writing that is done as interactive, shared or in a small group.

(Click on a picture to see an example of our community writing.)

This set of pictures is of a retelling of "Edwina, the Dinosaur That Didn't Know She Was Extinct" by Mo Willems. The students worked on the story map and story structure as an interactive writing and then in small groups completed the retelling.

Shared Writing-

Shared writing enables teachers to make the writing process concrete and visible to students. In shared writing, the teacher and students compose text together, with both contributing their thoughts and ideas to the process, while the teacher acts as scribe, writing the text as it is composed.

The purpose of shared writing is to model the thought process involved in writing and allow students to engage in and focus on the process. The teacher, acting as scribe, frees students from that aspect of the writing process so that they can focus exclusively on the thinking involved in writing. Shared writing is also a powerful method for direct teaching of key skills and concepts needed in the writing process.

Journal Writing-

Journal writing is an independent activity in which the students write from prompts or are given the choice to write what they would like. This is done as a center activity after the first few months of the year.

Writer's Workshop-

A writing workshop is a block of time set aside in the school day to focus exclusively on the writing process. Writing workshops take various forms, but the basic components are the same. In most cases, a writing workshop consists of a mini lesson teaching a particular skill or concept, a much larger block of time devoted to writing and conferring, and an activity that allows students to share their writing with the group.