Books 4 Results - Reading with Results

The goals of JoAnne Moore’s workshops and books are to:

Inspire and support teachers in the area of language arts
Further their joy of teaching children
Provide them with quality tools and materials in the areas of reading and creative writing

The first goal in this journey is quality primary reading education. This needs to be supported by a solid curriculum in reading, writing, and spelling. A curriculum which produces results must integrate: the decoding process, sight word memorization, spelling, and visualization all within the context of story. This is how effective comprehension is built. When a child has a successful reading experience it opens wonderful doors of opportunity.

Freeing children to read, spell, and write proper sentences lays a foundation which can lead into successful story writing. JoAnne’s second goal is to provide a series of story writing workshops and books to facilitate this process. Materials and workshops are designed to meet needs of students and teachers from first grade through to the seventh grade. Her method teaches children how to develop story problems through modelling. This is achieved by: identifying plot patterns in literature, collecting ideas from fiction and non-fiction books, choosing new characters and settings. These elements are used by the teacher and children to create their own original story maps. The second step in this method is to equip children with “author” language. Then, the story problems and the “author language” are combined together in a story writing project. This is taught andmodelled from start to finish by the teacher. The teacher and the children all write their own individual story creations in a teacher led process. In this way, story problem and “author language” can be integrated step by step.

The steps of the story project process are:

State the target sentence (e.g. Introduce your setting and main character)
Create a word web of the needed story language.
Model how to use it three times in three different ways.
Give children a hard copy of the word web. Children use word web or springboard off it and add their own words. They write (one to five sentences).
Children share what they have written.
Edit and then repeat this process (see numbers one to five) for the next portion of the story.

Through this method, children are given the tools necessary for creating their own ideas and the knowledge of how to present them with “author” language.