MindWing Concepts Blog

Just about any topic can be a context to develop narrative and expository language with Story Grammar Marker^®, Braidy the StoryBraid^®, and Thememaker^®’s narrative and informational language icons and maps.

Right about now, snow is big on everyone’s mind in the Northeast, having just endured a blizzard and with another snowy week on the way. So, though I don’t love it, snow can provide a good example of working within a theme and identifying and pairing activities to build narrative and other language skills while immersing students in a context...

Because collaborators come from different points of view in terms of their view of the students’ needs, the contents of this listing may be something to use as a discussion tool fostering collaboration among general education teachers, special education teachers, speech/language pathologists, school adjustment counselors and those focusing on social communication growth!...

My daughter’s book club chose “Wonder” by R.J. Palacio and she recommended it to me. This is a book that would support discussions centering on feelings, living in a community and what it means, developing empathy towards others, and the acceptance of differences, to name a few. The format of the book definitely lends itself to teaching perspective taking. There are many ways to approach this book within classrooms or therapy settings. Of course, the deciding factor would be the goals and objectives for your particular students...

Pocoyo is a British-Spanish television series featuring the adventures of a young boy and his friends: Pato the duck, Ellie the elephant and Loula, a dog. I first came upon the Pocoyo series accidentally, as one of its videos was contained in the terrific ABC apps from Peapod Labs. It turned out my young client is a BIG fan. I easily found other Pocoyo resources on YouTube (as is often the case) and discovered that the series’ vignettes were perfect for targeting both macrostructure with Braidy, the StoryBraid^®, microstructure aspects (verbs and pronouns) as well as Social Thinking^® and play skills, all targets for my client...

In the early 1970s, I began my work as a Speech/Language Pathologist in the Hartford, Connecticut Public Schools. The department head, Margaret Kennedy, an Iowa native, was trying to entice someone to teach a “Language Disabilities Class” at Dwight School in the South End. Language Disability was the new term in our field at that time. I had just gotten my Master’s Degree at Penn State and had an enlightening summer course in “language disabilities” under my belt. We used Helmer Myklebust’s text entitled Differential Diagnosis of Language Impairments, as our basic text and studied intervention methodologies such as the Association Method, developed at Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, the ITPA, Auditory Discrimination in Depth (now known as Lindamood/Lindamood)...

A recent posting shared on MindWing’s Facebook page (http://tinyurl.com/pierrewhitneyslp) showed a fantastic SGM^® lesson by Whitney Chitty Smith of “Let’s Talk with WhitneySLP,” related to the book, Pierre the Penguin, A True Story, written by Jean Marzollo and illustrated by Laura Regan. After viewing this terrific post (Thank You, Whitney!), I immediately went to the top drawer of my desk and pulled out the book. I had started a blog entry for this book back in November and had never completed it!...