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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SLPs and teachers working in language intervention often turn to wordless picture books as a fun context to develop storytelling skills. Series such as Mercer Mayer’s “A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog...” tell stories through pictures and ask readers to tease out the story, inferring the important details and relying on characters’ facial expressions to glean important clues. Similarly popular are David Wiesner’s Tuesday and Sector 7, which depict narrative through fantastical illustrations, and Alexandra Day’s Carl series, in which a dog goes to great, un-dog-like lengths to care for his charge, a little girl named Madeleine.

I have long been a fan of using such visual narrative materials with students, not only to develop storytelling skills, but also to work on Social Thinking™ concepts and perspective taking. Wordless (or word-minimal) videos also can be a terrific resource, as the characters are animated and require students to interpret body language in more real-life timeframes. The trouble is, videos can sometimes be hard to find and curate for use in therapy, as they tend to exist in helpful 5-minute clips within DVDs, or on YouTube here and there.

For this reason, I was thrilled to recently discover (via a friend’s Facebook post) Simon’s Cat, the YouTube series of short wordless (but meow-ful) videos in which a cat gets into various adventures, usually much to the chagrin of his owner. The naturally food-obsessed and self-centered Cat, across 17 (!) different videos available on the Simon’s Cat Channel, can be followed as he chases insects, interacts with hedgehogs, and often endeavors to be the center of his owner’s attention.

Take, for example, the hysterical “Let Me In,” in which the Cat, um, shatters the problem of a closed patio door. Like many of the videos in the series, the narrative can be analyzed as a complete episode using Mindwing’s Story Grammar Marker icons:

Clinicians will have a choice of a wide range of videos in the Simon’s Cat series in order to construct a character study for students, and the videos can be explored at various narrative levels, from Action Sequence to Complete Episode. Kids are sure to love them; I have received enthusiastic responses (and requests for more) Simon’s Cat after using the videos with both primary and upper elementary students, and I am sure older students would respond positively as well!

If YouTube is blocked in your district, be sure to check out my post about how to download videos at home and use them at school.

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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Over on my blog SpeechTechie this month, I am discussing in a series of posts the incredibly useful technique of using QR codes in language interventions. QR codes, which look like this....

...were born in the world of marketing (you may have seen them on ads about town) but are making their way into educational settings as an attention-grabbing tool. QR codes can be created very easily and printed, then scanned with free apps available for your smartphone or iPad. When scanned, the app will show text that you entered or a link to a website, depending on how you created the code. The result is an engaging process of discovery in which the student, instead of being presented a simple block of text, or shown a picture or website, participates in a little “peekaboo” moment in which the stimulus item is presented after scanning the code. Very cool.

QR codes lend themselves to be used in scavenger hunts in which a child locates the codes you have hidden around the classroom, therapy center, or wherever. They also lend themselves to story mapping, as a story can be broken down into text elements and printed as QR codes, one for character/setting, one for kickoff, and so on.

Given the season, I thought it would be fun to provide you with a Halloween lesson you can use right away that incorporates QR codes. You will first want to install a free app (click here for links to apps and a demo) on your smartphone or iPad that you can use to scan codes and display results. Presented below is a favorite ghost story of mine, “The Bus Stop,” modified from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones (a great resource for more short scares). Click on each of the links below and you will navigate to a webpage with a QR code image. Print it from your web browser (File>Print) and be sure to make a notation on the back of the print-out so you don’t lose track of what is what. Save them in an envelope for use next year too! When scanned, each of the codes will display the text linked below. This would be a great lesson to accompany the Story Grammar Marker complete episode map, and perhaps inspire students to create their own ghost stories using SGM to help them organize their narratives. Here goes!

	One night, a man named Ed was driving home from work in a rainstorm.
	When he passed by the bus stop, there was a woman waiting for the bus. She was soaking wet and had no umbrella so Ed offered her a ride home. She told him her name was Joanna and they talked while he drove her home.
	Ed thought Joanna was very nice and he enjoyed talking with her.
	He wanted to get to know her better so he asked if she’d like to have dinner sometime, and she said yes.
	Ed and Joanna went out to dinner and had a great time.
	They went out many times over the next several weeks, having fun at the movies and walks in the park. Each time he picked her up at the bus stop and dropped her at her house at the end of the night.
	One night, Joanna was not at the bus stop when Ed went to pick her up.
	Ed went to her house and rang the bell. A woman answered, and Ed told her he was looking for Joanna.
	The woman said she was Joanna’s mother, and invited him inside. On the hallway table, Ed saw a picture of Joanna, and asked when it was taken.
	Joanna’s mom said, “Right before she died, 18 years ago. She was hit by a car and killed while waiting for a bus at the bus stop.”
	Oooooh, so all that time he had been dating a ghost! Probably, that’s not so bad, given what I hear about dating these days. This story is always great for seeing that light of realization on kids’ faces at the conclusion (or helping them to make the connection)!

If you’d like to think about how to break down other stories and make your own QR codes, check out my post and video demo on SpeechTechie. It is MUCH easier than you think!

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 presents and consults on the topic of technology integration in speech and language 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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Recently in the Mindwing Blog I featured the Story Patch iPad app, which allows students to create stories according to provided structures or from scratch, resulting in a text and picture-based booklet.

I wanted to follow up that post with a different digital storytelling app that provides an easy means to create and publish dynamic animated stories with spoken audio and music! The app I speak of is Toontastic (an absolute BARGAIN at $1.99), whose creators at Launchpad toys have sought to bridge the gap created when students who primarily express themseves through play are suddenly expected to write stories (i.e. that gap we call “First Grade”). Toontastic uses the iPad’s multitouch interface and a play-like context beautifully as students are guided to create as many scenes as are needed to tell their story. The app would be a great tool to use in order to teach narrative elements and organization using Braidy the StoryBraid™, Story Grammar Marker™, or the Mindwing Autism Collection and their associated manipulatives and story maps.

Here’s a visual tour of Toontastic for you:

Toontastic comes with an audio explanation of story structure that can be easily aligned with Story Grammar Marker®, as can be seen above. You can choose to create five different scenes in your animated movie, or just stick with one!

Choose a setting, then Character “Toys” to put into action! You can also draw your own settings and characters.

Character Toys themselves can be custom colored, then tapped and dragged around the screen.  Tap Start Animation and the app will record as you move the characters and speak to provide an audio narration and/or dialogue. The app will then play back your animated scene!

For each scene, you can pick a music soundtrack that corresponds with the mood of the situation, connecting actions with internal responses of the characters.

When you are done with as many scenes as you’d like to create, tap Done and you can give your movie a title and genre, and share on ToonTube, Toontastic’s online community, if you’d like.  The story is automatically also saved within the app.

Students will be excited to publish to ToonTube, where others can interact with their film by “liking” it.  ToonTube also features model animations that would be a great context for story mapping of others’ creations using the SGM and other tools!

I recently had the opportunity to chat via Skype with Andy Russell, one of the creators of Toontastic.  If you have a few minutes, it’s an interesting conversation about the background of the app, its creators’ sound belief in social interactionist (Vygotskian) language learning, and future plans for the app and Launchpad Toys.

I hope you’ll check out Toontastic- it’s a great app to add to your narrative toolbox!

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 blogSpeechTechie: LookingatTechnologyThroughaLanguageLens and one of the editors of TherapyApp411.

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Over the summer I had the kind of “Kickoff” that we all hope to avoid in the course of our ho-hum days. It was a 95-degree school day and I was leaving one setting to go to my private practice and run a social skill group. As I opened my passenger side door to put my bag in the car, an oppressive blast of heat enveloped me. I decided stupidly that it would be a good idea to lean over and start the car so the A/C could have, you know, a millisecond to cool down the car as I walked around toward the driver side. Of course when I got there the door had locked automatically, as it had on the other side. Ugh.

As I stewed in the heat waiting for the auto club to help me out, I thought about the group I had to run shortly (with a dwindling amount of time to actually get there), and how using Story Grammar Marker® and sharing this story could possibly help them when I arrived. I find that when we open up to kids a bit and share real-life stories, their engagement level often increases as they realize that we are actually real people who make silly mistakes and have Kickoffs just like they do. Having received a preview of Mindwing’s upcoming new book, Facilitating Relationships, I also realized that my story could use what is called a Social Problem Solving Prompt, a key intervention outlined in the new book (and supported by the National Autism Center in its recommendation for story-based interventions). In this new book there are 18 different Social Problem Solving Prompts for social situations to help your students to recognize, think about and talk about a social situation including, characters, settings, kick-offs, feelings, conflicts, plans, perspectives and consequences.

When I got to our therapy center 10 minutes late, my graduate student had skillfully and promptly started group (see below for how this occurred), and they were sharing their own weekly news over snack. It seemed a good time to share my news, and I had grabbed a Student Story Grammar Marker as I passed a treatment room. “So, I have a story for you...” I started, and relayed the setting and Kickoff. A good teaching point immediately ensued when one of the boys shouted out “HA HA!” I cued him that while my positive body language while relaying the story could give him a clue that it was OK to smile and laugh a bit WITH me, what he had just done was more in the realm of teasing and made me think an annoyed thought! From there, my story really became a Problem Solving Prompt and an interactive discussion as I asked the boys a lot of questions while using the SGM for visual support:

How do you think I felt? Hot, annoyed, worried, angry were some suggestions.

Which Unthinkable can you guess almost got in my brain? Glass Man, who makes us overreact to problems and SHATTER! (See Michelle Garcia Winner and Stephanie Madrigal’s Superflex™ Curriculum)
Can you guess what my plan was? (This one took some scaffolding to elicit that my plan was to get into my car and get to group on time, or get the message to the center that someone needed to start group for me).

We then talked through what my problem solving steps were. Here’s a preview of what that could look like using one of the Prompts from Facilitating Relationships:

In effect, something as simple as my silly keys story could provide a quick teachable moment that touched on a lot of goals for this particular group: narrative organization, social inference, self-regulation, self-talk, problem solving and interpersonal skills, among others.

Additionally, we all got to talk about what my “Note To Self” should be (see Sara Ward’s excellent work on this concept) after this experience: Don’t start the car unless you are seated in the driver’s seat!

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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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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