M11: More Early Childhood Writing Instruction

In the video we watched on the last page, they talked about the importance of a variety of writing techniques with young children.  That video showed guided or cooperative or shared writing.  What about interactive writing?

In this next video, the teacher demonstrates interactive writing in Kindergarten.  She has a mixed classroom (ELLs and non-ELLs).  The teacher states,

"The purpose of interactive writing is working on spelling practices, phonics, phonemic awareness, and writing conventions by "interactively" composing the piece together while sharing the pen. It takes roughly 8-10 minutes out of your day and using the word study data."

In the next video, see how Zach as a young child writes in his journal about a banana spider we had living in the bushes right outside his bedroom window.  He liked to watch the spider catch insects and spin its web.  This video is an example of a young child writing on their own in their journal. 

To recap:  It is important that we think of reading and writing as integrated and interrelated.  With emergent literacy, it is very common to integrate reading and writing. As students get older, teachers tend to get away from integrating the two, but we shouldn't. In the examples of older students, the writing instruction is connected to reading as well, especially through the use of mentor texts (examples to show what we want to teach). The integration of reading and writing is a powerful strategy to facilitate literacy skills in both our monolingual and our multilingual students and is considered essential to ELL's acquisition of English in the classroom.