MindWing Concepts Blog

In April, Autism Awareness and Acceptance month, we have a specific focus on the population of students with autism spectrum disorders, awareness of their strengths and challenges, as well as strategies to help them be successful. This diagnosis often accompanies difficulties in social attention and situational awareness, as well as the ability to use narrative language to describe situations. And what is a situation? Essentially it comprises people (Characters) in a place and time (Setting) when events typical to the situation or unexpected for the situation (Kick-Off) occur. Besides the clear tie-in with Story Grammar Marker^® in this regard, also see the work of SLPs Sarah Ward and Kristen Jacobsen on the Space, Time, Objects, and People (STOP and Think) model of situational awareness...

Little Golden Books is celebrating 75 years of bringing affordable books to children. In 1942, these books were sold for 25 cents and proved to be an instant hit with children! Since then, over 2 billion Little Golden Books have reached children all over the world. We’ve included a photo of Sheila Moreau of MindWing Concepts with her father (Maryellen Moreau’s husband, Gerry), Gerry’s mother Rita, age 96 (seated, holding the Little Golden Book Saggy, Baggy Elephant) and three of Maryellen and Gerry’s grandchildren: Declan, Samantha and Casey (holding the Saggy, Baggy Elephant stuffed animal). Gerry, as a child, had the entire collection of Little Golden Books which Rita read to him and his sister, Karen. Then, Gerry read them to Sheila. Now, Sheila is sharing the love of these books with her daughter Casey and her niece and nephew...

Parents, families, schools, communities, and the child with Autism himself/herself all need support and understanding. MindWing’s materials help with aspects of Autism that include social learning problems, social communication disorders and work on expressing personal event narratives, facilitating conversation, building central coherence, Theory of Mind and perspective taking among other areas.

Being “aware” of Autism means that we know that no there are no books, activities and materials that are appropriate for ALL children with Autism. But still, MindWing’s goal is to help as many children as we can, regardless of diagnosis, age, culture, or ability.

They say the best camera is the one you have with you. The readiness with which we can document snippets of our own lives seems to have made life more visual...just look at social media. Our own images create opportunities for narrative language intervention, just as our own stories do. In Hadley’s (1998) Language Sampling Protocols for Eliciting Text-Level Discourse, the strategy of the conversation map—”give a story to get a story”—is used across narrative genres to provide a model and pragmatic rationale for “eliciting optimal samples of extended discourse.” The activities contained within the article provide great stimuli for obtaining language samples, but this principle of modeling and using personal stories certainly applies to intervention as well...

To Maryellen: “Wishing you good luck and true friendship forever!”  This was the inscription that author Martin Nelson Burton wrote in November 2004, on Maryellen’s copy of Dear Mr. Leprechaun, Letters From My First Friendship. This is a delightful, true tale based upon the author’s childhood writings to his leprechaun friend. The original letters and the responses (written by the author’s father, aka The Leprechaun) are presented in the book. On each page, there is a leprechaun that younger children will enjoy searching for. The beautiful artwork of Clint Hansen was created with paper sculpture. The last page of the book gives a brief description of the sculpture process that children and adults will find fascinating...

Are you looking for a way to reinforce SGM icons with students in your small groups? Using the stamps from our Icon Stampede Stamp Activity Set and Post-It Filing Tabs, create a set of icons as shown below. I picked up a clipboard to store them in order. Notice how the set of Post-It notes are green, yellow, and red to correspond to the beginning, middle, and end of a story. Various sizes are available; you may also decide to cut the larger ones in half, depending on your needs. I like the 2 inch by 1½ inch size, as I found them easy to remove...