MindWing Concepts Blog

Making the world a better place for children. That’s what an Easthampton woman has done through her work in helping children solve problems.

Maryellen Rooney Moreau is a speech and language pathologist. She was a professor at American International College and twenty years ago founded Mindwing Concepts, a business that creates tools to help children communicate better to solve problems and resolve conflict. Maryellen says, “The tools that I’ve created over the past many years, 20 years, that I’ve been a speech and language pathologist for over 35 years, and the focus has always been to help children who maybe have ideas in their head, but can’t get the ideas out. So to foster that in areas of reading and writing, but especially in the area of social communication.”

Maryellen has created a tool called the Story Grammar Marker. Her daughter, Sheila Moreau Pratt, is vice president of marketing and sales for Mindwing Concepts. She says, “It helps children to be able to tell stories, solve problems, think critically, communicate.”

It’s for her work that Maryellen is the recipient of the Boise Peace Quilt Lifetime Achievement Award. The project was started in 1982 by two mothers in Boise, Idaho. They made the first friendship peace quilt and sent it to people in what was then, the Soviet Union. There are 45 quilts now, given to people from all walks of life like Fred Rogers and Senator Frank Church. Gwynne McElhinney, a member of the Boise Peace Quilt Project says, “All of them share this idea that the world can be made a better place if each of us, in our own little patch of garden, our own backyard, think globally and act locally and look for conflict resolution.”

Maryellen received her quilt in Idaho back in October. A reception was held in Springfield Wednesday night to celebrate her milestone. McElhinney says the quilt has squares on it that were images that children drew, strategies to resolve conflict and they’ve been turned into fabric art

Maryellen now travels across North America training parents and teachers in methods to help children improve themselves in school and in life. Her passion to help children is making a difference. Maryellen says, “The reason I think I’ve made a difference is that I’ve given them a way to think through situations and be able to express those thoughts and plans and perspectives, just do everything that the piece quilt is a symbol of.”

MindWing Concepts is located at 1 Federal Street in Springfield at the STCC Technology Park. To learn more, call 866-851-2415 or check out their website, mindwingconcepts.com.

Watch Maryellen's Interview with WGGB

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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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