MindWing Concepts Blog

I have always Zoomed and Skyped at work and done the occasional FaceTime, but in the past week I have spent A LOT of time on HouseParty, MessengerKids, GoogleHangouts, and Zoom. I have “HousePartied” with my friends on St. Patrick’s Day, and with my girlfriends from college on my BFF’s birthday. Maryellen and I held a Zoom webinar yesterday for 1098 teachers and specialists, and we have Zoomed with our friend and colleague in New Zealand many times. My 6-year-old daughter even got on “MessengerKids” (a Facebook app) yesterday and now video calls me on a whim, along with video chatting with her friends.

Hello Maryellen, My 4th grade client just completed this during his session—thought you would like to see! I’m not the best at all the ins and outs of Story Grammar Marker® but I wanted you to know how powerful it is for children in this time of unexpected crisis! This client is 10 years old, and diagnosed high-functioning autism spectrum disorder and anxiety disorder. He’s so upset about having to homeschool, in tears at the beginning of the session. Sorry my handwriting isn’t a little more legible, but I was writing in a hurry as he was creating his narrative while holding the student SGM^® tool in his hands! By the end of our session, after working things out with SGM^®, he generated the three things that are nice about homeschooling—all by himself! I love your work and have happily used SGM^® with this client for about a year now, once a week in private speech. Thank you so much for all you do!...

Valentine’s Day is a great day to celebrate kindness and friendship with our students. We have provided many Valentine’s Day themed Story Grammar Marker^® lessons over the years. This past fall, we shared a lesson created by a colleague in Baltimore using the “There Was An Old Lady…” collection. The Valentine’s selection of this collection is There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed A Rose. Download the lesson plan here: Character, Settings and Sequencing with Braidy^®: Themed Lessons Using “There was an Old Lady…” Series.Another lesson is based on the “Llama Llama” series with the selection, Llama Llama, Be My Valentine. Here is the link to that lesson: Valentine’s Day Activities With Llama Llama and Gilroy Goat...

The practice of providing model narratives in order to scaffold personal narratives from students is one that is supported in our literature. Pamela Hadley (1998) describes conversational mapping, or “give a story to get a story,” as critical in language sampling, and these principles can be extended to intervention activities. Westby and Culatta (2016) suggest similar procedures: “Clinicians can model the telling of event narratives and ask children to relate their own experience about a similar event. One clinician told of a time when she did not close the door on her hamster's cage, and the hamster escaped and was never found. The telling of that experience elicited a child's story about a time when he had pet crickets in a cricket cage and the family cat got into the cage and ate the crickets.” We should remember that not every model needs to be a complete episode, though I realized after a recent trip to Utah’s National Parks that I had one ready-to-go. Additionally, this model also demonstrates the synchrony between Story Grammar Marker^® and Zones of Regulation^®.

In last month’s post (ASHA Wrap-Up, Part 1), I outlined one session from Orlando’s 2019 ASHA Convention that I was involved in, and promised a part 2! For this post, I am going to focus on resources I presented in an additional installment of “Pairing Picture Books and Apps for Contextualized Language Intervention,” a session I have been privileged to present over the last several years, with varying themes. In this session, given the proximity to Epcot, I thought it would be fun to highlight the ways that picture books and apps can be used to “Show Them the World (Knowledge),” meaning work in context to develop both Social Studies and general world or semantic knowledge. In all of my sessions on this topic, I have always emphasized the potential for both books and apps to provide context to develop both story grammar and expository text structure, modeling of course, with Story Grammar Marker^® and ThemeMaker^® tools and visual graphic organizers. Both macrostructure and microstructure can be emphasized when reviewing the story or information presented in a book or app, along with other skills...

This year brought those of the speech-language pathologist ilk to Orlando, which I have come to think of as the land of simulated Character and Setting. Inside the more sedate but still stimulating conference halls, MindWing’s tools were shared by a number of presenters including me! In Developing Expressive Language In Preschoolers: Strategies to Increase Utterance Length and Complexity (Mentis, Howland, Graham), the authors described their integration of Braidy the StoryBraid^® into a language and literacy program for preschoolers, providing graduate student clinicians with wonderful experience in targeting language in the context of stories and play. The presenters recommended a number of books used within their program, moving from emphasis on simple to more complex story grammar and microstructure...