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Though it should be a 12-month goal, this April—during Autism Acceptance Month—it’s important for us to be making strides toward considering what and how our students want to learn. Doing so gears us toward aligning with the client values aspect of Evidence-Based Practice and with implementing therapies that are responsive to neurodiversity. In this way, it’s helpful to consider the flexible aspects of tools such as Story Grammar Marker^®, so that we can show and affirm with clients that there are many ways to express ourselves. I recently was completing a lesson and activity with a group of middle school students about a topic I consider to be critically important right now: RESILIENCE. Resilience is in many ways wrapped up in narrative language because of the role of how we relate our own experiences (stories) to ourselves...

In a little deviation from what might be considered “high” tech this month, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the role of play in language interventions. Play is closely connected to narrative, as we often use story components to structure our play. I recently presented at ASHA Convention providing a “Play on Words” (click here for the handouts), and discussed a variety of playful contexts that can be used to target language (including narrative) and social learning. In particular, cooperative games with a shared goal and no real “winner”— except the group—can be used to target many communication skills...

Halloween is always a holiday that can be leveraged for engagement (and stories!) with our students. We hope you will add these three resources to your list to “harvest” annually! Through the pandemic telepractice-fest and beyond, I have enjoyed capitalizing on the trend of escape rooms for intervention activities. They make a great collaborative activity and encourage students to “think with their eyes” (ala Social Thinking^®) as they look for clues. Escape “rooms” from HoodaMath contain a brief “story” introduction--why you are trapped there, a Kick-Off, and what you need to plan to do to get out! And what is an escape activity but the exploration of a Setting? Use MindWing’s Setting Map to teach the language underpinnings of describing a setting. In particular, escape games are great for helping students to label the parts of a larger setting...

MindWing’s Digital Icons were first created in the wake of the Covid-19 emergency in order to offer access to tech-based material creation while many professionals were struggling to implement teletherapy as best we could. As you may know, the icon sets offer easy copying and pasting of the icons (including Story Grammar Marker^®, Braidy the StoryBraid^® and Thememaker^®) into various “blank slate” resources. This allows us to use word processors (Google Docs/MS Word), presentation tools (Google Slides/PowerPoint) or whiteboard software (Smart Notebook) as powerful narrative and expository teaching tools.

In this post, we’ll describe how to use MindWing’s NEW Virtual Posters product in distance learning sessions, and also how to annotate them for narrative scaffolding with students. The Virtual Posters provide a range of visuals that are easily added to Zoom or Microsoft Teams sessions (currently not Google Meet) and provide a reference for narrative/expository text and social pragmatics instruction. First of all, it is important to know how to add these visuals, which are JPEG image files, to platforms such as Zoom, in order to use them as virtual backgrounds during a session...

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^®.

This summer we are bringing back the “Summer Study Series!” This series of posts is providing summaries of recent research related to narrative and expository language and Story Grammar Marker^®/ThemeMaker^® in order to expand your toolkit and library of evidence-based practice information for September. So, to our study for the month! We invite you to Spain, this time, for some work clearly relevant in English as well, from García, Sánchez, Cain & Montoya (2019), published in the journal Learning and Individual Differences. Their “Cross-sectional study of the contribution of rhetorical competence to children's expository texts comprehension between third- and sixth-grade” looked at rhetorical competence (RC), or knowledge and understanding of certain text cues within expository texts and its interaction with reading comprehension...

When working with students on comprehending expository text, we can often capitalize on their interests for motivation. However, expository sources lack the draw of narrative, so it can be helpful to use technology to add engagement. In this post we’ll update you on five places you can find free expository text material for mapping with ThemeMaker^® maps for List, Sequence, Description, Compare-Contrast, Problem-Solution or other associated graphic organizers...

No need to break out the popcorn, we’re not talking about the argumentative kind of argument! I have been working with a high school student over the course of the past year who has particular difficulties in comprehension and discourse formulation. His school has quite a challenging program, and each session brings to the table a contextual assignment in which organizational strategies can be identified for him to apply. Fortunately, he is very engaged in the process and can always identify a task for which he needs help. This past week, he was working on constructing an outline for a debate argument, and I immediately thought of the Persuade organizer from MindWing’s Thememaker^® tool for understanding and organizing expository language...

First of all, you may wonder, what is telepractice? And, if you are not so interested in the answer, this post will still have some tech-related ideas for you to apply in your “in-person” therapies. To quote ASHA’s resource page on telepractice: “Telepractice is the application of telecommunications technology to the delivery of speech language pathology and audiology professional services at a distance by linking clinician to client or clinician to clinician for assessment, intervention, and/or consultation.” All of the exact same principles and practices of intervention via in-person therapies apply to telepractice, just the method of delivery is different. Telepractice is often conducted via a secure web portal such as Zoom, allowing clinicians and clients on the other side to communicate via microphone and webcam, and using visual and interactive tools to conduct activities (e.g., screensharing, giving the client control of the screen for clicking and dragging)...

Technology resources provide context through visuals and text, and these can be an extremely engaging way to introduce narrative and expository language structures to build comprehension. We can, along with our students, analyze the content of apps and websites in a process of co-engagement: What do you see? What do I see? MindWing’s narrative language icons and maps (Story Grammar Marker^®) and corresponding expository language structures (ThemeMaker^®) will lend a strategic and specific focus toward building the comprehension of discourse as you explore these resources! EPIC! Books for Kids is a clearinghouse of digital texts that are free for educators (sign up for the Educator Account). This resource is accessible on the web, iPad or even Apple TV, and contains 25,000 books, providing an experience similar to walking through a Scholastic Book Fair. The books are searchable by topic...

In this Autism Awareness and Acceptance Month, we turn our attention more specifically on our students and clients with unique social learning and language characteristics. A recent (2017) study by Westerveld and Roberts, The Oral Narrative Comprehension and Production Abilities of Verbal Preschoolers on the Autism Spectrum, has a number of implications that I would like to interpret in the context of tools available for narrative intervention. The study involved assessment of preschoolers’ narratives (notably an uninvestigated area for preschool students with autism, according to the article) via presentation of a fictional narrative and administration of comprehension questions and a retelling task. A large grouping within the sample did not produce a retelling that could be analyzed, but the 19 that did were assessed for length, semantic diversity, grammatical complexity and accuracy, intelligibility, inclusion of critical events, and narrative stage. The article notes that most of the research on spontaneous language of preschoolers with autism has focused on free play, rather than the ability to pull language together into narratives...

At November’s ASHA convention in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to present several sessions that integrated Story Grammar Marker^® and Thememaker^® with technology resources for narrative development, and wanted to share some of those ideas across a couple of posts (too many for just one)! When preparing to present in the “city of stars,” I thought about incorporating the theme of storytelling and movie-making, which was a great fit. I considered Hollywood’s penchant for sequels, and how that sometimes ultimately goes quite wrong in execution. However, when it comes to picture books, sequels and series are often a hit within language interventions...

Kids love talking about the beach, and so many Kick-Offs can happen in a beach setting! While not everyone is close to a coastal beach, trips to beaches or pools with family are a hallmark of summer, and can be a great context for narrative work during summer sessions or upon return in the fall. Here are a number of technology resources that can serve as contexts and scaffolding for this summer topic. The Toca Life apps, featured here on the MindWing Blog previously, are excellent contexts for any level of narrative development. Toca Life: Vacation features a number of Settings from which you can develop descriptive elaboration: a beach (naturally), airport, and hotel. Toca Life: Town contains several homes...

Story Grammar Marker^® intersects in powerful ways with social learning tools and methodologies such as Social Thinking^®, The Incredible Five Point Scale, and The Zones of Regulation^®. Many of these approaches emphasize situational awareness and understanding of social contexts. Also emphasized in these approaches is the process of “getting” others’ perspectives and the “Landscape of Consciousness” illuminated by discussing Reactions (using an SGM^® Reaction Sequence map) and advancing to target description of Feelings and Plans. Dr. Anna Vagin has carved a niche for exploring the utility of videos in addressing these aspects of narrative language and social cognition, detailed in her books Movie Time Social Learning and YouCue Feelings, which will be discussed in this post...

For this month’s Technology Tuesday, I wanted to spin off of the previous post and mention new resources relating to the themes of a few of these posts from the MindWing archives. So here is some commentary and additional tools relating to four of our back catalog of posts relating to language learning in the population of students with autism spectrum and related disorders. Aligning SGM^® with The Zones of Regulation, and Tech-Tie-Ins! This post described the key connections between Story Grammar Marker^® and Leah Kuypers’ wonderful and extremely useful Zones of Regulation curriculum. In the post, resources such as Pic Collage were mentioned for making visuals elaborating on emotional vocabulary associate with each Zone, and YouTube Kids for locating video scenes to assist students in identifying Zones and “Triggers” (essentially Kick-Offs) in others...

My previous post discussed the narrative element of setting and the tendency of students on the autism spectrum (or with other language disorders) to leave out details about setting, causing listener confusion. One way to explore the importance of setting is to plan interventions using books with an integral setting- where the setting is key to the motivations of the characters and understanding of the plot.

One of my favorites in this vein is Donald Crews’ Shortcut, the story of a group of cousins who find themselves in unexpected danger after taking a shortcut home. Not only does the book serve as an excellent example of building suspense around a small moment in a personal narrative (great for students working on memoir), it also lends itself to being mapped both on a Setting Map and a literal, visual map to develop storytelling skills...

Over the years I have developed a special interest in collecting and using picture books that are tangential to the classroom curriculum. It’s wonderful to find books that contain touches of our content areas but aren’t “in your face” about it! These books can engage students in a story (and thus help them develop narrative language) while also providing a context to access abstract curriculum areas.

Although many schools cover this topic at different times of year, Spring is a great time for a science unit on the five senses. For younger students, this is a basic overview on how we experience the world though hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch. For older students, these simpler concepts can serve as an entry point to the more difficult intricacies of how the sensory system works. Additionally, May is Better Hearing and Speech Month in the USA and May Month in Canada, so what better time to talk about the sense of hearing, and maybe sync with some lessons about hearing and speech?...

The narrative skill of describing and sequencing actions that can occur within a particular place is so relevant to the classroom curriculum, most recently redefined with the arrival of the Common Core State Standards. The classroom itself is a place where children learn, play, read, write, draw, listen, laugh, and sometimes argue, not necessarily in that order! Nearly every academic topic could be framed as an action sequence, while many children requiring narrative language intervention can get stuck at the previous level of naming, the descriptive sequence. We can help scaffold them to the next level using Story Grammar Marker^® and strategies from MindWing’s recent book, The “Core” of the Core: Using Story Grammar Marker® and Other MindWing Concepts Tools To Support Students in Meeting Grade-Level Common Core State Standards...

The article discussed this month interested me in particular because, although in private practice and university settings currently, I have a long history as a school-based SLP. As my caseload grew, I found huge value in forging partnerships with teachers to deliver a portion of services in their classrooms with co-led lessons, or simply taking the lead for 30 minutes a week. The teachers appreciated my efforts to tie in with curriculum topics and also providing them with tangible strategies they could carry over with students to support their language development.

SLP and social educator Anna Vagin has provided a wealth of resources that overlap wonderfully with MindWing’s methodologies in narrative language development. Through her website workshops, and terrific FREE mailing list, she shares connections to fostering conversational language, using engaging contexts such as games and animations to build social cognition, and recently, a new perspective on using visually supportive cognitive/emotional scales. Scales are a tried-and-tested tool for expanding thinking, linked to counseling approaches such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Motivational Interviewing (MI)...

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)...

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.

Happy Summer! Each year we set aside these few months on the blog to explore some recent research articles and literature that have relevance to MIndWing’s tools and narrative and expository language supports. This month we check out the first of a two-part article discussing game-based learning (GBL), a popular approach for engagement in classrooms, which can be found at Getting Serious About Games: Exploring How Game-Based Learning Is Used in Education and Therapy. The piece has many points that relate to how games can be used as a language and learning context...

In this Autism Acceptance Month, it’s more important than ever to hear the voices coming out of the neurodiversity movement and those of our students themselves. With many autistic individuals growing up and sharing via social media and other channels what has and hasn’t worked in their education, we have some affirming shifts that we can make, for sure. One angle that I always try to take is incorporating my students’ interests in sessions. This helps our activities to be engaging and context-driven, but also incorporates client values, a pillar of evidence-based practice. A teenage client of mine has shown a burgeoning interest in rock music and The Beatles in particular. It occurred to me immediately that many Beatles’ songs tell a story, so that was a great place to start. One of the key things I love about technology is that it can make context immediately available...

Among the tech resources that can be helpful in narrative intervention are those that let you make your own story. Content creation apps and websites, often called “digital storytelling” tools (search Pinterest for many examples in this genre), provide great contexts for speech, language and literacy skill development for their ability to visualize story elements in cartoons or images. Digital storytelling tools can be employed in parallel with Story Grammar Marker^® manipulatives, icons, and maps in a variety of ways: You make it: Create a product that you can “unpack” the story elements of with students, with SGM^® playing a key scaffolding role, of course. We make it: Co-create with students by allowing them to make choices to construct a story, with you handling parts or all of the actual tapping or clicking to move things along. They make it: Often facilitated with you providing a model...

As a (mostly entirely) telepracticing Speech-Language Pathologist during these weird times, I have found fostering narrative language in my students to be an even more critical intervention area than before. From providing opportunities to help students escape into stories, to helping them share their thoughts and feelings on school and home, current events and relationships, the Story Grammar Marker^® has been an essential tool in therapy. In this post, I will describe some tech-based applications of SGM^® for you to consider during the pandemic. Even with, and perhaps, because of the prevalence of remote learning, students are feeling isolated and likely having fewer opportunities to tell their stories and gain connections with others. In group therapy, we spend time letting conversation “breathe” and scaffolding connections. One way I have worked on this is to blend the new Conversation Paths product by Dr. Anna Vagin, CCC-SLP with Story Grammar Marker^® Icons to tackle multiple narrative and social-cognitive goals. Conversation Paths is a pack of editable conversation-scaffolding visuals (PowerPoint) targeting the building blocks of conversation: “4 Starters” (initiation strategies), comments, questions, and others.

MindWing’s icons for narrative and expository language can make conversation about any TOPIC a strategic and scaffolded one. Last month I recorded a free webinar with Maryellen (Technology Tools to Engage Children in Science & Social Studies During Distance Learning Sessions) on expository text structures (ThemeMaker^®) and using MindWing’s icons in context with technology resources. In this post, I’ll be giving some examples of expository-embedded resources online that can be used in teletherapy sessions. By expository-embedded, I mean resources that don’t necessarily say one, another, also, or first, then next, but can be used to form conversations and reviews with structures like List and Sequence. Take for example, Google Earth. This now-web-based interactive globe allows you to simply search and navigate in order to provide tours, and what is a tour but a LIST (or SEQUENCE) of places within a main idea or overall location...

MindWing has made its digital icons available at low cost to assist us as we are providing distance learning and teletherapy during this COVID-19 crisis (surely one of the biggest common kick-offs we have experienced). In this post, I’ll be outlining some what-tos and how-tos with the icons; if you’d like a longer visual overview, I recorded a webinar (Intersecting Story Grammar Marker^® with Technology and Telepractice: Distance Learning During this COVID-19 Crisis and Beyond) with Maryellen on April 1, 2020 and the recording is available for free on the site. The Digital Icons downloadable is a PowerPoint (PPT) file that can also be opened in Apple (Mac)’s free Keynote application or uploaded to Google Drive and opened with Google Slides. PPT files open automatically in Keynote, but let’s tackle that Google part first...

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...

Following up on last month’s Tech Tuesday post describing some narrative and expository teaching tools within Google’s G-Suite, this month we’ll look at some Google resources to visualize setting (and more)! Google Earth has long been a great tool for language development, as it is a searchable, interactive globe allowing you to zoom into an aerial (3D) image of any location, as well as offering Street View interactive imagery and text descriptions. Google Earth previously existed as a complicated downloadable application but now is available as a web version in the Chrome browser, as well as a simplified free iPad app...

I previewed last month that this month’s post would discuss some of those exemplar pairings specifically. Before we crack some books and launch some apps, a word about analyzing contexts. For both books and apps, it can help if they have what I like to call a “Speechie” quality. You can read more about this along with the FIVES criteria (Fairly Priced, Interactive, Visual, Educationally Relevant, Speechie). Breaking down the Speechie part, we can ask ourselves if the book or app is a context for speech and language development: • Does it have a narrative structure that can be used for intervention, considering Story Grammar Marker^® or Braidy the StoryBraid^® as a tool (this includes apps that allow you to make your own choices such that a story unfolds)? • Does it provide or allow you to interact with informational language...

Technology, as always, can help us bring contexts to the table, including the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Here is an updated list of tech-based visuals and interactives that can be used to elicit narrative and expository language using Story Grammar Marker^®, ThemeMaker, MindWing’s narrative and expository maps, magnets, and the SGM^® iPad App (still on sale through November for $14.99 in celebration of ASHA Convention). Epic! Books for Kids: This terrific resource offering free educator accounts and a huge variety of e-books (readable on iPad, web or Apple TV), offers some great contexts when you search for “Thanksgiving.” Among these are P is for Pilgrim: A Thanksgiving Alphabet (Crane/Urban), an alphabet book for all ages. Consider using this book to explore two different settings: past and present...

For this month’s Tech Tuesday, I will be discussing the use of a phenomenal and versatile app, Pic Collage, which can be used to make storyboards for books that can be analyzed as Complete Episode Narratives with use of Story Grammar Marker^®. Pic Collage has long been a favorite of mine, and I have written about it previously and presented with MindWing Concepts on its uses.  It seems that every time I sit down with a student, I find a new way to use this app! Pic Collage is a free app that is available for both iPad and Android devices...

As the MindWing blog has been focusing on using chapter books for older students, in conjunction with narrative and expository development tools, this Tech Tuesday post will also! In this post, we’ll take a look at technology resources that facilitate your access to chapter books. These strategies will enable you to use chapter books more easily as contexts when developing students’ sense of story and informational text structures with MindWing’s Story Grammar Marker^® and Expository maps. Naturally, we’d be conducting educationally relevant interventions even if we selected our own texts for lessons. For example, take this Common Core Standard for 5th Grade Reading...

As stated so well in It’s All About The Story, Book I of MindWing’s Autism Collection, “Tuning into one’s own Feelings as well as the Feelings of Others is extremely problematic to children with autism. The book provides visual flip charts, discussion prompts and an introduction to the Six Universal Feelings (happy, sad, mad, scared, surprised and disgusted), as well as ways to move beyond those Universal categories to more advanced feelings vocabulary—all of these resources give SLPs a great place to start...

This month’s post is a support for you and your students’ brains as we get deeper into this new school year. I have tried to make a habit of bibliotherapy, the practice of consuming books— literature or the more “self-help” type—that connects you to emotional regulation and growth. This month, I am reading Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence by Dr. Rick Hanson and I see such a connection to narrative language and Story Grammar Marker!...

As an SLP, I have always loved working with vocabulary development. Unlocking new words for students is so demonstrably gratifying. We can imagine that they will encounter new words later in their listening, reading, or general daily experiences with confidence, and hopefully find them to be tools to express themselves and even solve problems. Vocabulary is also an easy channel to target in the course of narrative intervention, context being a key to word learning. Targeted vocabulary can be part of the microstructure elements we emphasize...