As a teacher Jeannie's career spanned decades and two continents but she always had at the heart of her practice a love of children and their infinite capacity to be creative. She believed that her job was to fuel their curiosity and provide them with the tools to become lifelong learners. The foundation for that being literacy, in all its senses: being able to not just mechanically read words on a page but to truly understand them; to be able to assess and analyze the ideas they express and interpret what the writer means as much as what they say. It also means to be able to express their own ideas clearly and coherently, to be able to convince others of their arguments, to be able martial facts, and to be creative.

 

Jeannie has always loved words, the sounds and the shapes. She has always loved playing with words and understanding both their meanings and how to accurately use them. Over the years she has followed the research into how children acquire literacy and language and her instinctive sense of the value of rhythm and rhyme has been reinforced by this learning. Children need to hear expressive language, they need to play with sounds, words and phrases. They need to be read to and to hear conversation and debate as well as being encouraged to speak and argue, describe and imagine.

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Her writing for children draws on her own experience of all of these things, and in particular her love of the work of the masters of nonsense and imagination such as Spike Milligan, Hilaire Belloc, A.A. Milne, Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss and Nova Scotia's own beloved Sheree Fitch, just to name a few. Such work is more than just fun, although it is most definitely that, but it is immersion in the sounds and shape of language, the building blocks of literacy. Literacy is not built on sterile practice or a rigid application of spelling and grammar exercises, those things can be built in overtime, but rather on a love of language and a desire to hear, read and express for oneself. The mechanics of language are the tools of the trade and do need to be learnt in order to be articulate, but not at the expense of a love of language and not through rigid exercises nor arbitrary and punitive correction of mistakes.

 

One of Jeannie's favourite quotations comes from an academic paper on thinking:

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'Practice does not make perfect in the absence of understanding'

- Deanna Kuhn*

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*Kuhn, D. (1999). A developmental model of critical thinking. Educational researcher, 28(2), 16-46.