Joan Mancini

Joan Mancini was born in Brooklyn, New York,the middle daughter of a very Italian family with the name Patitucci. Joan's home was always filled with music, as she grew up with musician brothers and sisters. Her brother, John Patitucci, is a Grammy award-winning bassist who lives in NY. While she also enjoyed music, singing and playing clarinet, Joan was very shy and spent much of her time writing, stories, poetry and doodling ideas in her notebooks during class.

After she began teaching kindergarten, Joan realized the magical power of music in learning. She wrote her sight word songs to help early readers and writers have fun while learning to read and write high frequency words. After watching her students' enthusiasm for singing the songs and celebrating their learning results, Joan shared her songs with others, presenting at education conferences across California. When Scholastic contacted her for publishing, Joan was thrilled at the opportunity to widen her audience and share her songs.