Interactive writing is a teacher guided group activity designed to teach children about the writing process and about how written language works. The teacher and students negotiate and compose a message or other written text. The students are encouraged to "think" how a writer "thinks." The teacher and the students "share the pen" while writing word parts or whole words. The teacher will fill in the parts that the students do not know.
During interactive writing, students are involved in explicit demonstrations of the connection between reading and writing. They participate in a way that calls attention to details and concepts of how written language works while engaged in the writing process.
The following is a list of several interactive writing products.
- a description of something the students did
- a letter
- a note
- labels for a mural or a story map
- a recipe
- a graph
- a set of directions
- charts
- observations of science experiments
- a grocery list
- a retelling of a story
- a student's story
- a survey question
