Sherra Jones is coauthor of the Heinemann title Oral Mentor Texts. Her professional passion most revolves around oral-language development. The idea for oral mentor texts arose from this passion. As a primary teacher for more than twenty years, she understands the importance of speaking and listening skills. Children that demonstrate age-appropriate receptive and expressive language are primed to be successful with literacy tasks. In an effort to scaffold emergent readers and writers, she became interested in explicitly teaching students how to tell a story. This involved turning shared experiences into oral stories that students could practice and ultimately perform. Through an inquiry process, she soon became aware of the possibilities of teaching into these oral mentor texts. Now, she dips back into these oral stories to teach both comprehension and writing.
