Interactive Writing is a resource that shows teachers how to support young writers as they learn how to communicate their discoveries. Interactive writing can be used for just about any kind of functional writing that would appear in a classroom. It involves children as apprentices, working alongside a more expert writer, their teacher.

Interactive Writing is for the K-2 classroom teacher seeking to teach young students how to compose a wide range of texts including ones that would be too difficult for them to read or write without adult support.

Interactive Writing is organized into five sections, each of which highlights a different aspect of interactive writing:

• Learning to write in a quality literacy program
• Sharing the pen with young writers
• Young writers engage in literacy
• Young writers engage in the literacy journey
• The foundations of effective writing practice

The appendices also provide lists of books by genre, directions for making an easel that is especially suited to interactive writing, and a useful self-assessment rubric so that teachers can reflect on their personal growth over time.

Interactive writing is a dynamic, collaborative literacy event in which children actively compose together, considering appropriate words, phrases, organization of text, and layout. At points selected by the teacher for instructional value, individual children take over or “share the pen” with the teacher. In this book, Fountas and Pinnell describe how teachers can use interactive writing to involve children in spelling the words they need to express meaning. In the process, teachers draw children’s attention to spelling patterns and  letter-sound relationships within words so that they can learn how “words work.”