Literacy: Shared or Interactive Writing Teaching.

Learning activity 5.8: Develop a series of steps to teach students how to recognize and write a sentence. Consider that you would teach this during shared or interactive writing. Refer to SR 5.14: Pinnell & Fountas, page 203 for strategies to assist you.

According to Pinnell & Fountas (1998), “interactive writing is a teacher-guided group activity designed to teach children about the writing process and about how written language works.”
A series of steps to teach students how to recognize and write a sentence:

* The teacher gathers children around an easel/ blackboard/ a vertical plane on

which the teacher will be writing. All children should be able to see the writing.

* Together the teacher and children co-construct a message/text, i.e children write

word parts/whole words, teachers fill in the rest. These words for the children would be new or unfamiliar words, a challenging word, whereas the teacher will write in the simple familiar word. The reason for this is to spend more time focusing and learning the difficult word. This may take a series of days, if the sentence is a long one.

* Other ways include having word lists, word wall, name charts, referring to books

that children can refer to.

Demonstrating Writing:

* An example of interactive writing piece of work where the class students and

teacher can co-construct as part of an integrated science unit experiment incorporating other Key Learning Areas, for example a plant growing project.

The children with the teacher prior to experimenting would predict the outcomes, and the teacher would scribe down their predictions. After the experiment has been completed, the teacher and children would come together to discuss and write out their findings. Pinnell & Fountas (1998) suggests a strategy, whereby before composing, children reread some of the sentences they have written before proceeding further. They further suggest that these worksheets can be collected and be part of a big book, or it could go into the children’s individual folders for assessment.

Learning activity 5.9: Consider management issues such as size of groups, moving to next activity, behaviour, time issues and learning content of activities. Write a brief explanation describing how you would address the following:

Management issues – size and dynamics of groups, transition and rotation of groups, behaviour guidance.

Size and dynamics of groups:
To have effective management of student’s behaviour, each group should have about 6-7 children in a group in order that they could receive adequate attention from the teacher or adult who is working with them. The classroom teacher would enlist the assistance of teacher aides and parent helpers to assist in rotation learning groups. Parent helpers would help best in activities that do not require use of formal instruction or tools.

Transition and rotation of groups:
A task chart or something similar works as an effective visual behaviour management to guide to the learning centres they have been assigned to. The students would also be reminded to keep away the activities they have worked with for their rotation learning centre for the next group, and wait quietly to go into the next activity as

An egg timer is also an effective way of informing all groups that it is time for transitions. During rotations, the main teacher could also ring a bell for a similar effect. The main classroom teacher should also go from one group to another to observe how the students fare or work in each learning centre.

Behaviour Guidance:

The use of behaviour charts on the wall serves as an effective visual reminder and behaviour management tool. The teacher also reminds the students of the behaviour expected of each student together as she explains the activities being implemented for that learning centre