Author Talks for Children Workshops for Teachers Workshops for Parents Learner Support Workshops Author Talks
Pass The Poems Please
This is a workshop for children in grades 3-6 about the stories and experiences that resulted in the writing of my poems as children’s picture books. The workshop focuses on where authors get their ideas and how children can take notice of the possibilities around them to discover their own themes, topics and ideas for writing.
Classroom Visits
On these visits I talk with children about my books and the process involved in getting from idea to published work.
Diaries, Memoir, and Journals
This workshop explores the use of personal experience and memory to record events and reflect on experience in a unique and artful way. In this workshop I teach the use of simple but effective scrap booking techniques to decorate individual pages or entire journals along with tips on how to get started or sustain a daily writing habit.
Teaching Writing, Writing Teaching
This is a writing workshop for teachers who want to perfect their own craft as a writer. In order to be a successful teacher of writing a teacher should be a writer herself. This workshop helps participants develop a comfort level with writing and the writing process both in and out of the classroom.
Using the Arts to Help Meet the Learning Needs of All Children
This workshop explores how creative dramatics, music, movement and art help children solidify their learning of language skills and strategies. It also explores how hands on, interactive materials related to the arts can enhance literature and language programs and be used as effective learning tools. This workshop looks at how hands on learning through the arts can serve as a means of "scaffolding" for all children, but especially those children who are experiencing difficulty learning to read and write and comprehend.
This workshop explores how the arts provides children with story models and book language to help them figure out how language works. Discussion will involve how these activities provide vicarious experiences children can draw on when encountering stories in the future and how they encourage the awareness of symbolic representation and the ability to use representational skills. This, in turn, enables children to decode words and figure out how letters and words go together, as well as provides cues to help remember new words and concepts. These kinds of activities also serve as a motivator for the reluctant learner.
Exemplary Practices in Literacy
Summaries of the Regional Conference of the International Reading Association
Vancouver, October 24-26, 2002Session: Using the Arts to Help Meet the Learning Needs of all Children
Jane Baskwill and Paulette Whitman
Resource teacher Paulette Whitman and Jane Baskwill, elementary school principal and author (Somewhere, 1996, and Touch the Earth, 1999) shared ideas about how to incorporate the arts, specifically visual, musical and dramatic art, into the language arts classroom. Drawing from their action-researched, personal teaching experience they demonstrated that the arts can be valuable tools which aid and enhance learning and expression. "It's about helping children understand literature as a whole body experience" said Baskwill. "You have to feel it from inside."
Originally the audience was limited to 20 people, yet 40 squeezed into the space, some even sitting on the floor, to hear about the multi-modal and arts-based literacy strategies these women had to offer.
Kari Winters
Supporting Writing At Home
This workshop helps parents support children’s writing at home. Whether it be a writing assignment for homework or to motivate the reluctant writer or giving support to the budding novelist, this workshop, designed for parents, will share strategies to develop children’s writing skills in a fun manner.
A series of Professional Development sessions for teachers, administrators, School Boards and School Districts. Designed to help meet the special learning needs of at-risk students.
As the demands on educators to improve the literacy skills of all learners increase and the funding for education decreases, alternatives need to be sought which improve reading instruction in the classroom. One such alternative is the Learner Support Program.
The Learner Support Program is a framework designed to help teachers meet the needs of individual students who are having difficulty learning to read.
Learner Support:
- is cost-effective
- is classroom tested
- is easily implemented
- is applicable to all grade levels
- takes place within the classroom by the regular classroom teacher
- builds on the expertise and experience of teachers
- develops positive self esteem in both children and teachers
Based on sound theory and practice, Learner Support has been successfully implemented in actual classrooms by teachers with varying degrees of expertise and experience.
At its heart is a team approach to solving the problems of working with at-risk students and the improvement of the teaching skills of all those involved.
Professional Development Sessions Include:
Keynote Addresses
Discussion Seminars
Workshops
On site Consultations
A comprehensive selection of professional development sessions is available in a variety of formats designed to help teachers, school staffs and administrators implement Learner Support within the classroom, school and/or district.
Each session is tailor-made to meet the needs of the group involved.
Jane is available to work with:
School Boards to evaluate the needs of the schools within a district and develop a plan of action.
School-Based Teams to examine the needs of the school and inservice teachers on the rationale and methodology of Learner Support.
Teachers to explore the nature of the reading process and assess the needs of individual students and provide inservicing support for the implementation of Learner Support within their classroom.
Principals to develop ways to facilitate team-building.
Curriculum Supervisors to develop a plan for the professional development of teachers throughout the implementation of Learner Support.
Individual consultations to assess or address a school district's specific needs are also available upon request.