I am always thrilled to get letters like this because it represents SUCCESS with students. The letter comes from the 4th grade team at Hickory Creek Elementary in Jacksonville, FL.

"The 12 Steps of the Writing Process" was extremely helpful, and served as the springboard for many additional ideas we implemented throughout the school year.

We enjoyed classroom vocabulary duels, we came up with new planning models for narrative and expository writing, and we extended your idea of using different colored paper to help identify narrative writing parts to expository writing. We all used "Writing Superstars" to enhance our curriculum. Our team met every Thursday for 45 minutes to plan and discuss what we were doing in writing for that week. We all learned new ideas and we each served as a support system for one another. In addition, we invited 3rd grade teachers to meet with our team so we could share our ideas, develop a common vocabulary, and help them develop their students as writers.

We had five students earn a score of 6.0 on the Florida Writes test, our highest number ever! 86% of our students scored a 4.0 or above, which was a 10% improvement from last year...Thank you, Mrs. Forney, for not only providing us with the necessary training to spring us into action, but also, for challenging our team to commit to each other for the betterment of our students."