Interactive Writing: How Language & Literacy Come Together, K-2

This book has been a wonderful state-of-the-art resource book for primary public-school education classrooms. I am a teacher in California. My class assignment this year is a kindergarten/1st grade combination classroom. I started the year out as a 1st/2nd grade combination classroom but the enrollment changed at our school site that after the first two weeks the students were reshuffled around and I was given a mostly new set of students and had to make a room change. Now I needed all new materials and resources for the grade changes. Our school was given a very large grant and we as teachers were being observed by consulting firms to see if they approved of our teaching methods. Every so many months they come around to make several observations of us in our classrooms. They check to see if we are following their recommendations and if our classrooms are "child-centered classrooms". Most of the teachers are on edge at this school and are exhausted working many long hours and at their own monetary expense to make things happen at this school. This book offered me a wonderful resource for solving many of the concerns I had at this school for resolving a number of these difficulties. In it, are many ideas for getting your struggling students to come up to and approach grade level standards. The students are able to do activities that enable them to become excited able learners.

I am a kindergarten teacher who has agonized over the years at how to incorporate writing into my classroom. I've recently gone back to school to get my Masters in Language and Literacy to become a better teacher. My thesis is going to be on interactive writing. I have found this to be the BEST resource for explaining to me how and why and when to "share the pen" with my students. I can't praise this book highly enough. The pictures and lessons and rationale that have gone into this book are just what I've been searching for...The authors make so much sense...the literacy connection between reading and writing is based on research. Take a look at this book. I promise you, it'll change your outlook on how reading and writing can and should go together.

I am a first year teacher and I have finally incorporated interactive writing into my daily curriculum. It was not easy at first, but I have arrived at a successful and exciting place with this teaching method in my classroom. I think I could have reached this level of success back in September if I had Andrea McCarrier's book then. It is truly the missing link to a successful literacy centered classroom. This book has supplied me with enough specific ideas to initiate interactive writing on the first days of school next year. Letter ID and sight word development will be more effective and mastered more quickly by using interactive writing with my students. The beauty of interactive writing is it can be integrated with many other subjects: science, social studies, health, technology, etc. Only after a week of hard-core interactive writing, two of my students have emerged from confusion and are have begun to build sentences with spaces, punctuation and sensical inventive spelling. Many in the class have advanced with their writing, and this has also advanced their reading! This book has helped me come up with ideas, realistic goals, step-by-step procedures, and final product bulletin boards and books for their classroom. The book is full of photographs showing the beginning of the task, the task in process, and the final result. This is the new "bible" in my classroom, and I cannot recommend it enough for kindergarten and first grade teachers, both new and veteran. Now, if I could just find a book with this quality of information and step-by-step ideas that would focus on independent literacy centers to allow me to teach small group guided reading without an interruption, I would be able to teach the world to read! Come on Pinnell! Come on Fountas! Come on McCarrier! You write it or recommend it, I'll buy it!