Sharing the Pen Interactive Writing With Young Children

SHARING THE PEN: INTERACTIVE WRITING WITH YOUNG CHILDREN A few years ago, I had the pleasure of attending an institute sponsored by the San Joaquin Valley Writing Project in Fresno, California. I did a presentation on interactive writing, an exciting writing strategy I had just begun using with my kindergarten class. A few months later, Dr. Gail Tompkins asked me to coordinate a weeklong series of workshops on interactive writing in a nearby school district. As I started contacting teachers and viewing their presentations on interactive writing, I began to realize even more what a powerful teaching strategy interactive writing is and appreciate the variety of ways teachers were integrating interactive writing into their daily writing activities. The success of the workshops led Dr. Tompkins to the idea of putting all the different ways teachers were using interactive writing into a resource book that we could share with other teachers. We started meeting with Teacher Consultants in the Writing Project, discussing how we were using interactive writing in our classrooms. Soon, each of the teachers started writing about his or her favorite and most successful interactive writing lessons. We met over a series of months, reading each other's chapters and sharing thoughts and insights. We collected and analyzed students' work samples and tried out each other's lessons, which led to more discussion and refinement of our lessons and chapters. THE RESULT What resulted from the many exciting months of collecting, refining, and experimenting is the book in your hands. We hope this text will not only help you to understand interactive writing, but will provide you with many classroom-tested, meaningful ways of implementing interactive writing in your classroom. Interactive writing is the bridge between more teacher-directed (or modeled) writing and independent writing. We made two important discoveries in looking so closely at interactive writing: Teachers can easily differentiate instruction to meet the needs of any student during an interactive writing session. Phonemic awareness, concepts about print, phonics, and vocabulary development can be incorporated easily into each interactive writing lesson. We have many students in the San Joaquin Valley who speak English as a second language, as well as many struggling readers and writers; consequently, these discoveries were very important to us. Because interactive writing is a strategy most commonly used with emergent and early writers, many chapters in this text are most applicable to kindergarten through third grade. We have, however, included a chapter on using interactive writing with older, struggling students. Early chapters focus on the theory and implementation of interactive writing. The balance are individual lessons, or series of lessons, that teachers can use immediately in their own classrooms. The San Joaquin Valley Writing Project is part of the National Writing Project (NWP), and there are NWP sites in every state. If you are interested in learning more about the NWP or joining your local site, contact the National Writing Project through its website at http://www.writingproject.org .Tompkins, Gail E. is the author of 'Sharing the Pen Interactive Writing With Young Children', published 2003 under ISBN 9780131129658 and ISBN 0131129651.