MindWing Concepts Blog

The holiday season creates a lot of excitement for our students, no matter what holiday they celebrate! This mood can lead to a lot of language and, of course, the opportunity to develop narrative using Story Grammar Marker®. In this post, I’ll be mentioning a couple of resources you can use to acknowledge the season (in varying degrees of sectarianism) while reinforcing use of narrative elements and SGM® icons.

The first is a brief Pixar-like animated short I stumbled across in my blog-surfing routines; I am so glad I found it! As I described in a previous post, wordless videos can be an engaging way to have students “fill in” the language that is not used in the video, while also identifying emotions signaled by nonverbal cues. Check out Impossible Present, a great complete episode narrative to map, especially with elementary aged students who can handle the “unexpected behaviors” (Social Thinking®) and the brief flash of kid-buttocks! It’s all good when a laser is involved, right?

Impossible Present from Royale on Vimeo.

This story can be mapped as follows or using an earlier developmental level of narrative (e.g. a simple action sequence or reaction sequence):

The video also presents a great opportunity to talk about expected reactions (modeling the icons used in a narrative reaction sequence) to receiving or, in this case, finding a gift, and perhaps place them on an Incredible 5-Point scale:

5- Extremely Negative Reaction (saying something rude about the gift)
4- Mildly Negative Reaction (e.g. “I already have one of these,” making “a face”)
3- Neutral Reaction (saying nothing)
2- Positive Reaction (smiling, saying “Thanks! I can use this to...)
1- Enthusiastic Reaction (“WOW!”)

For other holiday fun, check out the iPad/iPhone/iPod app ClickySticky Christmas Sticker Book ($1.99), which allows you to create all sorts of picture scenes with students, including the following:

• a decorated living room (think SGM® or Braidy® Setting map...)
• outdoor winter activity scenes with simple animations (SGM® or Braidy® Action Sequence map, anyone?)
• a customized snowman, Santa, or elves (what Characters to describe using SGM® or Braidy® Character Maps!)

Tap and Drag to assemble characters, then tap the Play button for subtle animations that will prompt action words...

Happy Holidays, everyone!

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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Story Grammar and the Classroom Curriculum: The Five Senses

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?

One of my tricks has always been to use Amazon.com’s book search tool to locate stories related to a topic.  Although the search tool will of course return straightforward titles describing the topic, once in a while you also find those books that loosely theme to the topic.  Here are three of my favorite books that tell stories involving the Five Senses, all of which would be great opportunities to use Braidy, the Story Braid or Story Grammar Marker to guide students through and retell the stories. In fact, within MindWing’s Autism Kit, the book It’s All About the Story contains a map or chart for thinking, talking and writing about “settings” in terms of the Five Senses. There is even a Five Senses Song, sung to the Tune of “This Land is Your Land,” a familiar song by Woody Guthrie! I have included these two pages from the manual for your download. You can get the whole manual (or Autism Kit) at MindWing’s Online Store:

Click images to Enlarge

The simplest of these is Rain by Manya Stojic, featuring animals on an African Savannah as they experience the coming rain through their senses.  The book has wonderful pictures and simple text forming an action sequence.  Because the theme involves cycling though the rainy and dry seasons, Braidy and SGM can help you form a visual for the students; just hold the Tie-Up to the Kick-Off to form a circle!  In addition to the animals’ experience, the book touches on the cycle of plant growth, another key science curriculum topic and a nice opportunity for a picture sequencing task.

Another thematic action sequence can be found in the book Night Train by Caroline Stutson and Katherine Tillotson, the tale of a young child’s experience on a train ride to the city. Narratively, it lacks a real plan and attempts (but as such, is great for using Braidy and SGM to move kids from isolated details to a real sequence of events), and focuses on the sensations inherent in the train ride: hearing the engineer call “all aboard,” seeing cows in the field, etc. The book can also be used to target other items in the transportation category and brainstorm the different sensations one would experience while riding a car, boat, plane...(thus getting into the expository element of Listing).

Finally, a real crowd-pleaser can be found in Judith Hyde Guilliland’s Not in the House, Newton!, about a boy who finds a magic crayon that brings all his drawings to sense-pleasing (but mom-annoying) life!  This one can be framed a bit more within the Critical Thinking Triangle, with Newton finding the magic red crayon (Kick-Off) and feeling excited, so planning to draw things he’d like to see come to life. Again, by extension the book can be used to List things that are red (or other colors) and imagine what would happen if they came to life from our drawings!  Both Night Train and Newton are great for creating sense charts with students. 

Hope you enjoy these great Five Senses-themed and Braidy-friendly books and activities!

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 Speech Techie: Looking at Technology Through a Language Lens, which won the 2010 Best New Edublog Award. He can be contacted at sean@speechtechie.com.

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April is Autism Awareness Month, and I wanted to highlight one of my favorite tools that I employ with students with autism spectrum and related disorders: The Incredible 5-Point Scale by Kari Dunn Baron and Mitzi Curtis. The 5-Point Scale is a tool designed to help students understand the confusing, emotional and language-heavy range of human behaviors by boiling it all down to a scale of 1-5. The approach is very versatile and can be applied to many situations and target behaviors, such as emotional state, voice volume or scales to help students grade their responses to everyday occurrences such as a “Participation Scale” within the classroom.

The original 5-Point Scale book models how to use the tool as an affective scale, with 1 being “fine” and 5 reflecting an “out of control” feeling.

Where you want the student to “be” on the scale can depend on the scale- in general, a 5 is always bad, but your target level may not always be a 1. In the example of the Participation Scale, when setting up the range with the student, you might describe a 1 as disengaged and “tuned out” in class. A 5, then would be “dominating” and thus the target level would be a 3- “listening and making comments appropriately.” It all depends how you want to apply it!

What the Incredible 5-Point Scale allows you to do is reduce the language load on your students while teaching them a strategy that can be carried over into many situations. It provides a way to give simple and quick feedback (without power struggles): “You’re at a 4 right now. Let’s move that down to a 3.” Additionally, you can continue to scaffold and build language by associating the simple numbers and labels with more complex descriptions of emotions and social behaviors. The 5-Point Scale is wonderfully “sharable”; once you create one with a student or group, it can easily be applied in their classroom or home setting by a teacher or parent, somewhat like an advanced social story.

The 5-Point Scale also is wonderfully complementary if you are using Story Grammar Marker with your students, because many scales can be constructed around (and teach variations according to) narrative elements such as Setting, Kick-Off and Reaction. Take, for example, a scale designed to help students gauge and react to problems (Based on Michelle Garcia Winner’s “Big Problem, Little Problem” strategy in her Think Social curriculum):

On the first page of my document above, you can see how the Problem Scale has been aligned with Story Grammar Marker by using the icons (perhaps a great use of the Universal Magnet Set) for Kick-Off- meaning the kind of Kick-Off or problem one is encountering- and Reaction. The scale thus shows 5 kinds of problems and an expected reaction. In the second scale, you can see that the scale has been applied to a particular setting- Halloween night in the neighborhood. The kids I worked with all generated the Kick-Offs at each level of problem- a very engaging activity for them and a good preview of the holiday. The Kick-Off and Reaction icons provided an additional connection recently when I developed a “Negativity Scale” and we discussed 5 different Reactions to the same Kick-Off (e.g. a friend spilling your drink), ranging from overly positive (1) to extremely negative (5).

I definitely recommend that you visit Kari Dunn Baron’s site and check out her products. In particular, I have found the original book and video a great place to start, and her excellent Social Times series of magazines for students shows how the approach can be expanded, with a different 5-point scale in each issue.

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.

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