TKI uses the New Zealand Education Sector Logon system for user accounts. A TKI account lets you personalise your experience - enabling you to save custom homepage layouts, create kete, and save bookmarks and searches.
If you already have an Education Sector user ID and password, you are ready to log in. If not, you should register with the link below.
In “interactive writing”, a variation of shared writing, all the children are involved in scribing the common text. Each child needs a marker or pencil and a small whiteboard or clipboard. The teacher leads the writing, but all the children write down the text themselves, sometimes copying and sometimes writing known letters and words themselves.
Interactive writing is most effective with a small group. It provides a safe and supportive environment for reluctant writers, for NESB students (students from non-English-speaking backgrounds), and for any students who need to give intensive attention to features of the English language.
By involving their students in this way as “apprentices”, the teacher can make explicit the various conventions of print (such as spacing, punctuation, and directionality) as well as helping the children to express meaning and think about what is being written. As the children become more confident and fluent, they will move from interactive writing, where they are fully supported, to guided writing.
I use everyday events or objects to create sentences to work with. If it’s a windy day, we might discuss what it feels, sounds, or looks like, and I will draw out from the students a sentence that captures what they think, feel, or notice, like “The wind is whooing and booming”. My focus is to help the students to extend their vocabulary and articulate and record a complete sentence.
I encourage them to quickly record the known words and help them to slowly articulate, hear, and record the sounds in the words that are unfamiliar to them. “You can write ‘the’. Say ‘wind’ slowly. What can you hear?” The students independently use their knowledge of sound-to-letter relationships to attempt the unknown words on their whiteboards while being observed and prompted to make connections between what they know and what they are learning. “You can write ‘in’. Now, how can you write ‘wind’?” I record the correct word on my chart, and this provides instant feedback on their efforts. This way, they are receiving a correct model to read from.
Teacher, year 1 class