Narrative

Last of 3-Day Lesson Ideas for Settings: When choosing Big Red Barn as a follow-up to the “At the Farm” assigned passage, my purpose–as a parent at home–was to use the book to elaborate on the topic that was presented in the assigned passage, as a teacher may do in school. I wasn’t worried about lexiles. I wanted a book that would appeal to a child in kindergarten to read for fun and maybe to teach a few things. When looking through Big Red Barn I found many elaborations!

Facebook Live with Maryellen

In our daily mini-lessons during these uncertain times, we, at MindWing Concepts, Inc., are providing book titles, many available online, to read to children about the not-so-huge situations that make us feel “not so great,” as well as those that contribute to feelings of well-being. We have provided “feeling bookmarks” for talking about the names of feelings to help us talk about some of these big and smaller situations that we call “kick-offs.” There are many ideas in the handouts provided during these mini-lessons that will help to show relationships of characters’ feelings to kick-offs and the thinking and planning necessary to deal with them. Using the icons to bolster listening comprehension will spur and organize our discussions. Everyone needs to talk! We just have to think about how to do it during these times!...

Maryellen Rooney Moreau of MindWing Concepts reads Talk and Work It Out for purpose of Problem-Solution analysis and discussion with students.

This year brought those of the speech-language pathologist ilk to Orlando, which I have come to think of as the land of simulated Character and Setting. Inside the more sedate but still stimulating conference halls, MindWing’s tools were shared by a number of presenters including me! In Developing Expressive Language In Preschoolers: Strategies to Increase Utterance Length and Complexity (Mentis, Howland, Graham), the authors described their integration of Braidy the StoryBraid^® into a language and literacy program for preschoolers, providing graduate student clinicians with wonderful experience in targeting language in the context of stories and play. The presenters recommended a number of books used within their program, moving from emphasis on simple to more complex story grammar and microstructure...

The Day You Begin, by Jacqueline Woodson and illustrated by Rafael Lopez, is a beautiful, nonlinear story to share with children, especially at the beginning of the school year. It encourages children to think about their feelings when entering new situations and creates an opportunity for teachers to provide a discussion with and to show support of children in such situations. Before sharing the selection, take a look at the following links for background information. This book is actually a story of a girl named Angelina, included with examples and guiding suggestions for fitting in, with which all of us can identify. Included below is also a link to the illustrator’s website, Rafael Lopez, discussing the development of the artwork for this book, which older students would find interesting...

I am frequently asked to conduct evaluations encompassing social cognition and pragmatic language and always find it extremely valuable to include a detailed assessment of narrative language. However, in doing so, and having reviewed previous assessments of these students, I often find that I am like a newcomer to a desert landmark, standing there saying “Hey, look at this…?” Why haven’t the examiners before me documented and then suggested interventions around these inevitably present narrative language issues?...