Collaborative Writing

Today in class we learned about collaborative writing and how we can utilize this motivating way of writing in our classrooms. In the 2nd grade core curriculum under standard 7 in language arts, objective 6, indicator b says that students will produce traditional and imaginative stories, narrative and formula poetry as an individual/shared writing activity. Word processing can help me meet this standard. I especially love the idea of having children collaboratively write a story together as a class, either in Word or on a Google Doc. Since 2nd graders are still so young and not experienced on the keyboard, I think I could increase their excitement and motivation for writing by having them dictate a story to me as I type it on the computer in front of the class. We could use bubbl.us to brainstorm together of what we'd like to include in the story. And then each student could have a turn "writing" (dictating out loud) a sentence for the story. Doing this would also help with concepts of print, spelling, grammar, etc. I think using collaborative writing in these younger years would be very helpful in creating enthusiasm for writing amongst the students.