MindWing Concepts Blog

Last week, Maryellen Moreau, creator of Story Grammar Marker^®, consulted with two special educators in southern Connecticut about a student with Autism. This particular child’s evaluation recommended Story Grammar Marker^® as an intervention. The school hired Maryellen to work with this child’s teachers as well as larger groups of staff in the school to get everyone on board with the SGM^® methodology. During our first session last week, one special educator looked up at Maryellen and with awe in her voice said, “This is just so amazing. It is so simple…yet so, so deep. I know I will be able to do so much with this – with so many different students. How did you EVER think of this?” The answer to that question is that it happened in the late 1980s while Maryellen, a speech language pathologist, was Curriculum Director at the Curtis Blake Day School in Springfield, MA (a private placement for children with dyslexia and language learning disabilities)...

Are you an educator or parent who has used Braidy® the StoryBraid^® or Story Grammar Marker^®? If so, you have likely realized the true depth and breadth of this approach and how much these tools help your children/students, who have various abilities, in so many social and academic areas. You might have tried to share these tools with colleagues or collaborators but their remarks (below) that are meant to downplay the depth of these meaningful tools and convince you that it is not necessary to collaborate with you...

“That’s cute.” You are right! It IS cute, which is one reason it is engaging for children. But in addition to being cute, do you know that the Story Grammar Marker^® is rooted in discourse language development research and it is designed to make this evidence-based methodology accessible to educators and children by having meaningful colorful icons, an appealing texture and being hands-on?...

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...