MindWing Concepts Blog

Project-Based Learning (PBL) is a recent trend in educational design, and involves presenting students with real-world contextual tasks that relate to curriculum areas. PBL is a great approach for Speech-Language Pathologists and Special Educators to employ as our students benefit from having their learning relate to personally relevant and functional content. To learn more about PBL, watch this great video from Common Craft. One tool that has been integrated as a kind of PBL is the “Webquest,” a set of web pages that outline a task and provide web-based resources for its completion. Webquests are not new, and teachers have been developing them for some time. There is a particular Webquest that I wanted to share with you in this post, particularly because it is one you could use in classroom, small group, or even individual language therapy while integrating Story Grammar Marker® and Thememaker® tools in the process.

The webquest I speak of is called the Tantalizing Adjectives Webquest, originally designed by Ann Ryan. The task presented is as follows:

You and your partner are very excited about having the opportunity to create a menu for your themed restaurant. Since this is a new experience for both of you, there are certain tasks that you will need to accomplish.

They include:

• Review the definition and types of adjectives
• Analyze and evaluate online menus
• Decide on the theme for your restaurant
• Choose the types of food you would like to serve
• Write descriptions using adjectives
• Use an online dictionary and/or thesaurus to improve word clarity
• Create a menu

Kids love food and going out to restaurants, and will be instantly excited when you present this task to them! The Webquest provides necessary links and resources on its “Process” page, but you can always feel free to supplement these as you’d like (a few suggestions to follow).

So, where does the SGM® come in? First of all, I use it to outline the scope of the project, and each session we recap our progress and what is left to do using the SGM®. This provides the students with multiple exposures to the icons and the “story” of our project.

Additionally, when you arrive at the stage of the project that provides models of themed restaurants, you can use the SGM®/Thememaker® Descriptive setting map in multiple activities. First of all, it provides a framework for breaking down the idea of “theme” so that students have a strong descriptive model of a realized theme. After reviewing the examples provided, students can complete a Descriptive Setting map for one of the restaurants.

In this part of the activity, I supplemented the Webquest by displaying two resources. First of all, there is a wonderful video describing T-Rex, a restaurant in Downtown Disney in Orlando, Florida. This provides an example of a fully realized theme, and can be used with a Descriptive Setting map to model the process. Another fun extension activity is to look at the website for S’MAC in NYC. This macaroni-and-cheese themed restaurant provides yet more examples of strong menu descriptions, and you can introduce the concept of “teaser” and “clincher” statements within the descriptions here, e.g. “Be swept away by the Mediterranean Sea...” for Mediterranean Mac and Cheese. However, for decor, S’MAC is not really a realized theme, so you can have kids brainstorm what would improve it, yet again using a Descriptive Setting map. Mine came up with: cheese-shaped furniture and lighting, macaroni-shaped table legs, waitstaff dressed in yellow and orange, and a macaroni fountain!

After exploring themes with your students, you can have them work with their group to brainstorm themes and select a theme. The Thememaker List Map comes in handy here:

Later, students work to describe what their restaurant will look like, and begin to think about menu items, using a Setting Description Map:

I have done this project a number of times in the past, and making a traditional poster for the menu works quite well. However, this year I am thinking of using Glogster with the students to make the final project. I will plan to update you in a later post, hope this project was interesting to you. You can find a resource of other Webquests here.

Sean J. Sweeney, MS, MEd, CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist and instructional technology specialist working in the public school and in private practice at The Ely Center in Newton, Massachusetts. He has presented on the topic of technology integration in speech and language at the ASHA convention and is the author of the blog SpeechTechie: Looking at Technology Through a Language Lens and one of the editors of TherapyApp411.

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After a TORNADO, an EARTHQUAKE and now a looming HURRICANE, we at MindWing have become preoccupied by the weather. Usually snowstorms are our biggest threat! The past couple of months of weather have been surreal. We have had workshops cancelled and have spoken to colleagues and friends throughout the east coast who have had school called off due to the hurricane warning.

The paragraph below about Hurricane Irene was found yesterday on http://thesiweather.com/ and exemplifies the IMPORTANCE OF COMPREHENDING EXPOSITORY TEXT IN A “REAL LIFE” SITUATION. Below the paragraph are ThemeMaker® maps organizing the complex, extensive information from this weather report. We thought this could be used for a “content area” lesson.

HURRICANE IRENE

Despite the threat for severe thunderstorms later today and early tonight, the main story is the approach of dangerous Hurricane Irene. Irene continues to be a major threat to the Mid-Atlantic region for this weekend with numerous power outages and flooding problems likely. Irene appears to be headed on a collision course for the New York City metropolitan region and will likely create hurricane conditions Saturday night and Sunday to include torrential rains and destructive winds. Irene is headed for the Outer Banks region of North Carolina by late Saturday as a major hurricane (ie category 3 or higher). It should then move along the east coast to a position near New York City by Sunday night – likely as a category 1 hurricane. By early Monday, Irene will likely be moving towards western Massachusetts as a tropical storm. This storm has several ominous features that make it a very dangerous storm for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast; especially, along the coast from North Carolina to Maine. First, it is a powerful hurricane - possibly reaching category 4 before making landfall on Saturday. Second, it is a larger-than-normal hurricane which means it will contain heavy rain and strong winds over a very large area. Third, and perhaps most important for New York and New England, it appears that this system will only slowly weaken as it rides up the east coast thanks in part to warm sea surface temperatures up the coast. All of this suggests an extreme weather event is in the offing near and along the coast from North Carolina to Maine and torrential rain and devastating winds will occur inland as well back to near the I-95 corridor. All of the major cities from DC to Boston will be impacted severely by Irene this weekend with the brunt of the storm here Saturday night and Sunday including possible wind gusts to 90 mph. Stay tuned for updates on this serious weather event for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

See ThemeMaker® Maps below….

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ThemeMaker, Mindwing’s expository companion to Story Grammar Marker, helps children break down and produce the more challenging expository text that becomes central to learning as they advance through the grades! I have found that children are more open to working with expository text once they learn that the familiar SGM icons can help them along the way! While each ThemeMaker Expository Text Map (e.g. List, Sequence, Description, Compare-Contrast) is helpful on its own, kids need to be moved toward understanding that ALL of these structures are contained in curriculum discourse and text!

That can seem like an overwhelming task, but it becomes manageable and fun using a recently developed and FREE online tool, GlogsterEDU, a site that tells all students to “poster yourself!” What is a poster, really, but a display of information that utilizes these key expository structures? Using GlogsterEDU, you can choose and research any topic with your students using ThemeMaker maps and icons, then create a “Glog” with pictures, images and graphics, text (structures!) links, and even recorded audio and video if you wish! How to do all this? Well shoot on over to SpeechTechie, where we are wrapping up Glogster Week, a week of posts featuring examples of how to use Glogs in Speech-Language and other interventions, as well as how-to screencasts showing each step of how to use this (again, FREE) resource. If you’re catching up later, you can just click over to see all the posts regarding Glogster.

How do the ThemeMaker icons work with text structures? Well as I mentioned, they can be used to explore any topic, so I thought I’d present you an array of structures that explore GlogsterEDU itself!

And for a specific example, please check out this Glog I created with a student. D. was studying continents, so we used ThemeMaker Maps to research and break down information about Earth’s land masses, then had a blast creating this Glog (be sure to roll over the Glog to find our links)!

I hope you will consider GlogsterEDU a fun and helpful context to use Mindwing’s tools!

Sean J. Sweeney, M.S., M.Ed., CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist and instructional technology specialist working in the public schools and in private practice at The Ely Center in Newton, Massachusetts. He has presented on the topic of technology integration in speech and language at the ASHA convention and is the author of the blog SpeechTechie: Looking at Technology Through a Language Lens, which won the 2010 Best New Edublog Award. He can be contacted at sean@speechtechie.com.

Click Here to View Expository Text Structures and Glogster

Click Here to View Glogster

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Happy Thanksgiving from your Friends at MindWing Concepts!

For a yummy Thanksgiving appetizer, we have posted a fantastic recipe from our friend Stacy called: Baked Apple Cheese Dip. This recipe is posted as a ThemeMaker™ List Map and a Sequence Map. See below!

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