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I almost dislike writing about gratitude at Thanksgiving time, as it is a practice that is self-regulating all year round. It is well documented that regularly steering our thinking toward gratitude helps override our brain’s negativity bias and train ourselves to notice positive elements of life, with influence on our mood, and therefore our executive functioning. Recent discourse around gratitude has created the term “glimmers,” serving as the opposite of “triggers.” Glimmers are small observations that help calm our nervous systems....

Downloadable Lesson Material

If Google’s Arts and Culture website can be taken as a model, it seems like artificial intelligence (AI) is rejuvenating the interactive website. For some years there was a wealth of interactive websites that allowed for making choices and creating stories, but these seem to have faded with the retirement of technologies like Flash, and also by the redirection of priorities through the pandemic years. Check out Google’s growing library of games for some hope for this form of instructional technology. Sparky is a great one to start with. In this activity, you create inventions by combining everyday objects. Begin by choosing a purpose for the invention—food, music or travel—then allow your students to use their imaginations and collaborate…

Lately, I’ve been coming back to an oldie-but-goodie resource, SCRIBBLENAUTS (“Remix” version available for iPad or iPhone for $.99 with tons of content, other options explored below). Scribblenauts is a puzzle game where players can type in upwards of 20,000 nouns, even with adjective modifiers, to bring in objects that help solve stated problems within the scene. As such, it provides an open-ended “sandbox” with a range of stories solvable with actions and elaborated noun phrases. I like to think of Scribblenauts as a series of mini-lessons, one of those 5-10 min “rewards” for students that are actually language therapy activities...

From twinkling lights and festive decor to excited students counting down the days, there's an undeniable energy that fills the classroom this time of year. As teachers, SLPs, specialists, and parents, though, the holidays often come with “double dip” feelings of—joy and stress, combined with the hustle of balancing lessons, holiday events, and end-of-year tasks. Amidst it all, it’s easy to feel like you’re racing against the clock. But what if you could slow things down just enough to create meaningful holiday-themed learning experiences?

Continuing on an artificial intelligence (AI) track this month, I was curious recently whether any tools have surfaced that specifically relate to creating stories. Creating a story about a timely, curriculum-related, or personally relevant topic is, of course, an activity that can create a great context for analyzing the result with Story Grammar Marker^® and applying its icons to language mapping. AI tools are also fun to play around WITH students and can be used metalinguistically with prompts to the tool to use specific story elements...

This month we will look at a study using play contexts to build narrative language. It’s notable that since the publication of this 2020 study, “Believing in Make‐Believe: Efficacy of a Pretend Play Intervention for School‐Aged Children with High‐Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder,” there have been some significant shifts in our field’s focus towards neurodiversity-affirming language and approaches. For example, we should avoid stigmatizing labels such as “high-functioning”...