MindWing Concepts Blog

Barnett’s stories are playful, visual, and funny. Whether it’s the humor in Oh, No! and Oh, No (Not Again), or the adventure and irony of Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, these books present many narrative and expository opportunities with Story Grammar Marker^®, Thememaker^®’s expository maps, and, of course, visual tools such as magnets and digital icons. What sets many of these books apart is the way they use visual cues, nonverbal behavior, and subtle character plans—a perfect match for SGM^® icons that help students recognize story structure and the “landscape of consciousness” (characters’ plans, mental states, and feelings)...

Maryellen, Sheila, and I have had many conversations about how almost any context can be put into story form with Story Grammar Marker^®! On the flip side, we know that it takes practice and linguistic flexibility to consider what “fits” as each story element, though I often also say that you can’t really do it wrong. There are many ways to tell a story. As the holiday season is upon us, I was thinking about the variety of cultural and religious (or both) observations that take place around this time, and how they tie into the observation of the winter solstice...

I almost dislike writing about gratitude at Thanksgiving time, as it is a practice that is self-regulating all year round. It is well documented that regularly steering our thinking toward gratitude helps override our brain’s negativity bias and train ourselves to notice positive elements of life, with influence on our mood, and therefore our executive functioning. Recent discourse around gratitude has created the term “glimmers,” serving as the opposite of “triggers.” Glimmers are small observations that help calm our nervous systems....

A thought balloon is a very valuable tool. It provides a visual scaffold that opens doors to that “landscape of consciousness” that is characteristic of the later stages of the narrative developmental sequence (stages 4-7). As such, it’s the gateway to perspective-taking! I’ve become enamored with Story Grammar Marker’s thought balloon icon, accessed among other ways through MindWing’s Digital Icons Set and The Critical Thinking Triangle in Action. Working with neurodiverse clients, this icon provides a key cue toward using mental state verbs and adeptness with reading others’ thoughts and intents...

McCabe and Rollins (1994) perfectly describe the value of model stories in their article on eliciting narratives: “In spontaneous interactions, you have to tell a story to get a story. Almost everyone has experienced awkward silences in social situations. No one can think of a thing to say. However, the minute one person launches into a tale about locking keys in his or her car or leaving lights on in a parking lot, virtually all others in the group share a similar incident that happened to them.”

Sketch and Speak works like it sounds, scaffolding students’ use of pictography, or quick sketches, to visualize details of an expository passage, followed by their oral description. This process has terrific synergy with MindWing’s methodology and materials, particularly ThemeMaker, as structural comprehension approaches (i.e. ,analyzing List, Sequence, Description, Compare-Contrast, and other structures) go hand-in-hand with developing understanding of the expository content. In fact, MindWing’s Expository Maps go so well with this strategy, they can literally be used as the space for it.