A First-Grade Teacher Uses a “Practice Page” in Interactive Writing 

From the Marshall Memo #427

In this thoughtful article in The Reading Teacher, Cheri Williams (University of 

Cincinnati), Tammie Sherry (Northern Kentucky University), Nicole Robinson (Salvation 

Army Learning Center in Cincinnati), and Diane Hungler (Williams Avenue Elementary School in Ohio) describe how Diane, a Reading Recovery-trained first-grade teacher, reads a big-book story with her students, asks a question (“What’s the crazy thing that happened in this story?”), gets student responses, and then draws a line nine inches from the top of her large writing tablet and explains that the space above it is “the practice part” where they will rough out their interactive writing sentence before using the bottom part, which is “where we write.” 

The three researchers watching this were struck by how it “transforms the nature of interactive writing instruction in significant ways.” They believe her use of the practice space is an example of mediated action, which allows the kind of explicit instruction that’s particularly helpful to primary-grade children. 

In most ways, Diane’s daily 20-30-minute interactive writing segment is similar to the standard model:

• She focuses on a shared experience – a book they’re read, a field trip, an experience.
• Students share ideas about possible texts to be written, often revising the message several times to capture “the best part” or “the main thing that happened.”
• Once the precise message has been decided, the teacher begins to write it on a large writing tablet.
• As she writes, she thinks out loud about the writing process, for example, “I have to begin with a capital letter” or “I need to leave space between the words so that everyone can read our message.”
• She wonders aloud about specific words in the text: “I wonder if the word huge would be better here than big? We can change it if we want to; writers often revise their work.”
• The teacher “shares the pen”, inviting students to come up to write specific letters, letter clusters, capitals, words, or punctuation marks. “The goal of sharing the pen,” say Williams, Sherry, Robinson, and Hungler, “is to focus students’ attention on specific aspects of the writing process that they are still coming to understand or need to learn to develop as writers.” 
• The teacher continues to draw attention to letter-sound correspondences and orthography patterns used to spell the words they are writing. She also talks about spelling strategies students can use on their own.
• Throughout the lesson, the teacher and students reread the text they have written to make sure what they have written makes sense. They also continue to edit and revise, as “good writers” do. 
• At the end of the lesson, the teacher summarizes the key concepts taught and talks to students about the ways they can use them in their own writing. 

Diane does all this in her interactive writing segments. But she has included a new wrinkle – the practice page. Drawn from Reading Recovery, this “working space” is where students can focus on specific words with their teacher:

• They can “try out” a word they think they know before writing it in the story.
• Teacher and students may analyze the sounds in a particular word, perhaps using the Elkonin boxes – another Reading Recovery technique. 
• Students may be asked to do repeated writings of a particular high-utility word.
• The teacher can write models of letters or words that students need.
• When students are uncertain, the teacher can encourage them to “try it on the practice page.” 

In her interactive writing lessons, Diane most often used the practice space for “word solving” – figuring out the spelling of specific words to be written in the class’s story. “We do our thinking out loud,” she explains. “Using the practice page makes the instruction more explicit, powerful, and memorable for students. By breaking down the spelling of a word or showing students some strategies they can use to spell a word, it makes spelling more concrete. It helps them understand [orthographic] concepts that were previously confusing to them… The practice page show visible evidence of how we work out words that are tricky. Some students may need this extra visual.”

“As Diane worked with children on the practice page,” say the authors, “strategy instruction was foremost. She explicitly taught, demonstrated, and prompted a variety of word-solving strategies.” For example, she pointed out how an is part of landed, how rain rhymes with train, how Sally is different from really. “Diane also used the practice page to draw students’ attention to ‘tricky’ aspects of words.” Sometimes Diane prompted children to “use a resource” in the room – like the word wall – or asked them to “say it slowly and listen for the sounds”  and “stretch it out.” These promptings signaled her expectation that students were supposed to use the cognitive tools she’d taught them. “She was shifting responsibility for word solving to the children,” say the authors. 

Observing her through the year, the researchers noticed that she shifted from using the top portion of the writing tablet as the practice space, to using a separate tablet, to using a dry-erase board, which made it easier for students to erase and correct errors. This modeled the practice of proficient writers, who use every scrap of paper to jot ideas and develop thoughts. In February, Diane gave each student a clipboard and paper and told them, “You should be writing what we are writing up here. You should also have a practice part somewhere on your paper. Make a little place on your paper, so you have a place to practice – in case you need to practice. I’m going to walk around and check your papers. I want to see everyone’s practice part.”

Two weeks later, Diane replaced the clipboards with individual dry-erase boards, markers, and erasers. She told students they would be writing entire sentences: “Okay, write that sentence, that’s your job,” she said. A student then wrote the sentence on the class board, and students checked their own work to see if they had it right. 

“The Practice Page as a Mediational Tool for Interactive Writing Instruction” by Cheri Williams, Tammie Sherry, Nicole Robinson, and Diane Hungler in The Reading Teacher, February 2012 (Vol. 65, #5, p. 330-340),

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/TRTR.01051/abstract; the authors can be reached at cheri.williams@uc.edu, sherry1@nku.edu, nikbranrob@hotmail.com, and hungler.d@norwoodschools.org