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Hello! You are here because stories are fun and engaging, right? Well, they also are strategic for teaching and learning. The National Council of Teachers of English(NCTE) states that story forms can aid in memory and recall across the curriculum: “Listeners encounter both familiar and new language patterns through story. They learn new words or new contexts for already familiar words.” It just makes sense! The context, engagement and emotional activation of a story can assist in any vocabulary related to that story. In this post, I’ll be detailing a number of tech- and non-tech resources for using vocabulary “stories.” Check out Beck, McKeowan, and Kucan’s Bringing Words to Life. This seminal vocabulary-teaching text discusses the concept of Tier 2 vocabulary words (robust words which link to concepts kids understand, such as the word final), and teaching them through context, kid-friendly definitions and word play.

Among the tech resources that can be helpful in narrative intervention are those that let you make your own story. Content creation apps and websites, often called “digital storytelling” tools (search Pinterest for many examples in this genre), provide great contexts for speech, language and literacy skill development for their ability to visualize story elements in cartoons or images. Digital storytelling tools can be employed in parallel with Story Grammar Marker^® manipulatives, icons, and maps in a variety of ways: You make it: Create a product that you can “unpack” the story elements of with students, with SGM^® playing a key scaffolding role, of course. We make it: Co-create with students by allowing them to make choices to construct a story, with you handling parts or all of the actual tapping or clicking to move things along. They make it: Often facilitated with you providing a model...

In a little deviation from what might be considered “high” tech this month, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the role of play in language interventions. Play is closely connected to narrative, as we often use story components to structure our play. I recently presented at ASHA Convention providing a “Play on Words” (click here for the handouts), and discussed a variety of playful contexts that can be used to target language (including narrative) and social learning. In particular, cooperative games with a shared goal and no real “winner”— except the group—can be used to target many communication skills...

Halloween is always a holiday that can be leveraged for engagement (and stories!) with our students. We hope you will add these three resources to your list to “harvest” annually! Through the pandemic telepractice-fest and beyond, I have enjoyed capitalizing on the trend of escape rooms for intervention activities. They make a great collaborative activity and encourage students to “think with their eyes” (ala Social Thinking^®) as they look for clues. Escape “rooms” from HoodaMath contain a brief “story” introduction--why you are trapped there, a Kick-Off, and what you need to plan to do to get out! And what is an escape activity but the exploration of a Setting? Use MindWing’s Setting Map to teach the language underpinnings of describing a setting. In particular, escape games are great for helping students to label the parts of a larger setting...

MindWing’s Digital Icons were first created in the wake of the Covid-19 emergency in order to offer access to tech-based material creation while many professionals were struggling to implement teletherapy as best we could. As you may know, the icon sets offer easy copying and pasting of the icons (including Story Grammar Marker^®, Braidy the StoryBraid^® and Thememaker^®) into various “blank slate” resources. This allows us to use word processors (Google Docs/MS Word), presentation tools (Google Slides/PowerPoint) or whiteboard software (Smart Notebook) as powerful narrative and expository teaching tools.

Continuing here with 2021’s Summer Study Series, this post will be a little different. Rather than focusing on analysis of one article for further learning, I’d like to point you in the direction of a few resources related to a theme: mental health and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve all heard and experienced it in some way, at this point almost a cliché; it was a school year like no other. Loss of a feeling of safety, of connection, of experiences, of freedoms, perhaps of health or people in our lives, these all pervade our memories of the past year. I’m of the mindset that every little bit of processing is potentially helpful. However, you may feel uncomfortable or unequipped to go into these topics in personal narrative with your students. For some support, I’d like to point you in a few directions...

The “Give a Story to Get a Story” technique is one we all know makes sense. We’ve seen what often happens when we ask students to produce a narrative out of the blue. More often than not, we are rewarded with a blank stare! The use of the “Conversational Map,” the formal name for this technique, was first described by Peterson and McCabe (1983) and, in web-accessible articles, adapted by McCabe and Rollins (1994) and Hadley (1998). In my experience, these articles hit on principles applicable when working with preschool, through adult clients, who can all benefit from language scaffolding...

The practice of gratitude is one that research suggests can be helpful psychologically all year round, so my hope is that this post will be useful to you in many days beyond Thanksgiving. However, when you think about it, gratitude is based in narrative, as a thought/emotion we have in response to life events. Culatta and Westby (2016), in a tutorial entitled “Telling Tales,” suggest that intervention to improve narrative language including emotional and theory of mind content should “focus on emotion and character traits that cross events.” For this and other reasons, particularly “in these difficult times,” we would do well to cultivate expressions of gratitude in interventions across the year and in varied contexts. Here are some resources to help you promote gratitude along with narrative and expository language...

As a (mostly entirely) telepracticing Speech-Language Pathologist during these weird times, I have found fostering narrative language in my students to be an even more critical intervention area than before. From providing opportunities to help students escape into stories, to helping them share their thoughts and feelings on school and home, current events and relationships, the Story Grammar Marker^® has been an essential tool in therapy. In this post, I will describe some tech-based applications of SGM^® for you to consider during the pandemic. Even with, and perhaps, because of the prevalence of remote learning, students are feeling isolated and likely having fewer opportunities to tell their stories and gain connections with others. In group therapy, we spend time letting conversation “breathe” and scaffolding connections. One way I have worked on this is to blend the new Conversation Paths product by Dr. Anna Vagin, CCC-SLP with Story Grammar Marker^® Icons to tackle multiple narrative and social-cognitive goals. Conversation Paths is a pack of editable conversation-scaffolding visuals (PowerPoint) targeting the building blocks of conversation: “4 Starters” (initiation strategies), comments, questions, and others.

In this post, we’ll describe how to use MindWing’s NEW Virtual Posters product in distance learning sessions, and also how to annotate them for narrative scaffolding with students. The Virtual Posters provide a range of visuals that are easily added to Zoom or Microsoft Teams sessions (currently not Google Meet) and provide a reference for narrative/expository text and social pragmatics instruction. First of all, it is important to know how to add these visuals, which are JPEG image files, to platforms such as Zoom, in order to use them as virtual backgrounds during a session...

For our last 😢entry in our “Summer Study Series” for 2020, we look at a perspective on social cognition with a twist: how are children with significant speech sound disorders, such as apraxia of speech, impacted within the sequence of developing social competencies? This article, What Does It Mean to Be Social? Defining the Social Landscape for Children With Childhood Apraxia of Speech, is provided by Nancy Tarshis, Michelle Garcia Winner, and Pamela Crooke (2020) and was released within ASHA’s Perspectives (Special Interest Group 2) journal available to anyone with a SIG membership in any specialty. For others, the article is behind a paywall, so I hope this review at least will be helpful...

For the past several years in this space we have presented a “Summer Study Series” highlighting peer-reviewed articles and research relevant to narrative and expository assessment and intervention. For 2020, we begin with A Systematic Review of Academic Discourse Interventions for School-Aged Children With Language-Related Learning Disabilities (Peterson, Fox & Israelsen, 2020). Systematic reviews are a higher tier of research applying selection criteria and metrics to determine effect sizes of studies of particular types of interventions. In other words, a study of studies specific to narrative and expository (more the latter) discourse...

MindWing’s icons for narrative and expository language can make conversation about any TOPIC a strategic and scaffolded one. Last month I recorded a free webinar with Maryellen (Technology Tools to Engage Children in Science & Social Studies During Distance Learning Sessions) on expository text structures (ThemeMaker^®) and using MindWing’s icons in context with technology resources. In this post, I’ll be giving some examples of expository-embedded resources online that can be used in teletherapy sessions. By expository-embedded, I mean resources that don’t necessarily say one, another, also, or first, then next, but can be used to form conversations and reviews with structures like List and Sequence. Take for example, Google Earth. This now-web-based interactive globe allows you to simply search and navigate in order to provide tours, and what is a tour but a LIST (or SEQUENCE) of places within a main idea or overall location...

MindWing has made its digital icons available at low cost to assist us as we are providing distance learning and teletherapy during this COVID-19 crisis (surely one of the biggest common kick-offs we have experienced). In this post, I’ll be outlining some what-tos and how-tos with the icons; if you’d like a longer visual overview, I recorded a webinar (Intersecting Story Grammar Marker^® with Technology and Telepractice: Distance Learning During this COVID-19 Crisis and Beyond) with Maryellen on April 1, 2020 and the recording is available for free on the site. The Digital Icons downloadable is a PowerPoint (PPT) file that can also be opened in Apple (Mac)’s free Keynote application or uploaded to Google Drive and opened with Google Slides. PPT files open automatically in Keynote, but let’s tackle that Google part first...

In last month’s post (ASHA Wrap-Up, Part 1), I outlined one session from Orlando’s 2019 ASHA Convention that I was involved in, and promised a part 2! For this post, I am going to focus on resources I presented in an additional installment of “Pairing Picture Books and Apps for Contextualized Language Intervention,” a session I have been privileged to present over the last several years, with varying themes. In this session, given the proximity to Epcot, I thought it would be fun to highlight the ways that picture books and apps can be used to “Show Them the World (Knowledge),” meaning work in context to develop both Social Studies and general world or semantic knowledge. In all of my sessions on this topic, I have always emphasized the potential for both books and apps to provide context to develop both story grammar and expository text structure, modeling of course, with Story Grammar Marker^® and ThemeMaker^® tools and visual graphic organizers. Both macrostructure and microstructure can be emphasized when reviewing the story or information presented in a book or app, along with other skills...

The practice of providing model narratives in order to scaffold personal narratives from students is one that is supported in our literature. Pamela Hadley (1998) describes conversational mapping, or “give a story to get a story,” as critical in language sampling, and these principles can be extended to intervention activities. Westby and Culatta (2016) suggest similar procedures: “Clinicians can model the telling of event narratives and ask children to relate their own experience about a similar event. One clinician told of a time when she did not close the door on her hamster's cage, and the hamster escaped and was never found. The telling of that experience elicited a child's story about a time when he had pet crickets in a cricket cage and the family cat got into the cage and ate the crickets.” We should remember that not every model needs to be a complete episode, though I realized after a recent trip to Utah’s National Parks that I had one ready-to-go. Additionally, this model also demonstrates the synchrony between Story Grammar Marker^® and Zones of Regulation^®.

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?...

This summer we are bringing back the “Summer Study Series!” This series of posts is providing summaries of recent research related to narrative and expository language and Story Grammar Marker^®/ThemeMaker^® in order to expand your toolkit and library of evidence-based practice information for September. So, to our study for the month! We invite you to Spain, this time, for some work clearly relevant in English as well, from García, Sánchez, Cain & Montoya (2019), published in the journal Learning and Individual Differences. Their “Cross-sectional study of the contribution of rhetorical competence to children's expository texts comprehension between third- and sixth-grade” looked at rhetorical competence (RC), or knowledge and understanding of certain text cues within expository texts and its interaction with reading comprehension...

When working with students on comprehending expository text, we can often capitalize on their interests for motivation. However, expository sources lack the draw of narrative, so it can be helpful to use technology to add engagement. In this post we’ll update you on five places you can find free expository text material for mapping with ThemeMaker^® maps for List, Sequence, Description, Compare-Contrast, Problem-Solution or other associated graphic organizers...

No need to break out the popcorn, we’re not talking about the argumentative kind of argument! I have been working with a high school student over the course of the past year who has particular difficulties in comprehension and discourse formulation. His school has quite a challenging program, and each session brings to the table a contextual assignment in which organizational strategies can be identified for him to apply. Fortunately, he is very engaged in the process and can always identify a task for which he needs help. This past week, he was working on constructing an outline for a debate argument, and I immediately thought of the Persuade organizer from MindWing’s Thememaker^® tool for understanding and organizing expository language...

Illustration by Ariel Davis for NPR

I’m a big NPR person. It’s a great resource for listening, and for narrative! This past month I was intrigued by a feature on “EMOTIONAL GRANULARITY”—being able to name or describe your emotions more specifically. The author described an increase in stress in his life being alleviated by his working on “learning more emotion words and emotion concepts from one’s culture.” There was research to support his assertion that this self-identification was of help; according to Kashdan, Barrett, and McKnight (2015), “evidence suggests that interventions designed to improve emotion differentiation can both reduce psychological problems and increase various strands of well-being.” We can reframe this information in the light of what we might usually address as speech-language pathologists and literacy interventionists...

First of all, you may wonder, what is telepractice? And, if you are not so interested in the answer, this post will still have some tech-related ideas for you to apply in your “in-person” therapies. To quote ASHA’s resource page on telepractice: “Telepractice is the application of telecommunications technology to the delivery of speech language pathology and audiology professional services at a distance by linking clinician to client or clinician to clinician for assessment, intervention, and/or consultation.” All of the exact same principles and practices of intervention via in-person therapies apply to telepractice, just the method of delivery is different. Telepractice is often conducted via a secure web portal such as Zoom, allowing clinicians and clients on the other side to communicate via microphone and webcam, and using visual and interactive tools to conduct activities (e.g., screensharing, giving the client control of the screen for clicking and dragging)...

This past week featured the American Speech-Language Hearing Association’s annual national convention in our home state (and my home city of Boston)! MindWing presented and exhibited at the convention and I was proud to be part of two presentations that incorporated MindWing’s tools with context-setting resources including both technology and picture books. I was thrilled to present another edition of an oral seminar describing the helpful pairing of picture books and apps for contextualized language intervention. As this year’s ASHA theme focused on evolution and innovation within the field of speech-language pathology, this presentation centered around pairings that aligned with social studies and science topics (Boston also is a “Hub” of both disciplines). Some of the background within this presentation centered on why SLPs and literacy interventionists might seek to incorporate social studies and science topics in our work...

Following up on last month’s Tech Tuesday post describing some narrative and expository teaching tools within Google’s G-Suite, this month we’ll look at some Google resources to visualize setting (and more)! Google Earth has long been a great tool for language development, as it is a searchable, interactive globe allowing you to zoom into an aerial (3D) image of any location, as well as offering Street View interactive imagery and text descriptions. Google Earth previously existed as a complicated downloadable application but now is available as a web version in the Chrome browser, as well as a simplified free iPad app...

Using interactive apps and websites, we can help students deconstruct discourse and see its essential parts. However, technology can also provide a space—a blank slate, so to speak—that we can use to help students use narrative and expository elements and icons to build language through engaging mini-projects using apps for creation. The realm of “digital storytelling” has expanded, and at the same time became more simplified with the arrival of easy-to-use apps. iPad and Android “creation” apps (oft referred to as apps that allow students to “show what they know”) can be used to make picture collages, books, animations or videos that tell a story or give information...

Technology resources provide context through visuals and text, and these can be an extremely engaging way to introduce narrative and expository language structures to build comprehension. We can, along with our students, analyze the content of apps and websites in a process of co-engagement: What do you see? What do I see? MindWing’s narrative language icons and maps (Story Grammar Marker^®) and corresponding expository language structures (ThemeMaker^®) will lend a strategic and specific focus toward building the comprehension of discourse as you explore these resources! EPIC! Books for Kids is a clearinghouse of digital texts that are free for educators (sign up for the Educator Account). This resource is accessible on the web, iPad or even Apple TV, and contains 25,000 books, providing an experience similar to walking through a Scholastic Book Fair. The books are searchable by topic...

Maybe you’ve heard of Minecraft. In the past several years, this gaming universe has become particularly popular with the elementary set, and also has sparked efforts to incorporate its visually engaging and spatially useful interface into educational contexts. This post was sparked by some questions from a reader of this blog who wrote me to inquire whether I use Minecraft in my work and as a language development context, so I thought I might elaborate on that here. Complicated, right? My philosophy on technology integration in speech and language work has always been that tech is a tool to establish context, engagement, foster interaction and provide visual supports. It’s for this reason that complex, extended activities with technology such as Minecraft are not something I gravitate towards, though they are certainly possible if well planned. After all, we tend to have a limited amount of time for intervention with our students, and every minute is important...

In this Autism Awareness and Acceptance Month, we turn our attention more specifically on our students and clients with unique social learning and language characteristics. A recent (2017) study by Westerveld and Roberts, The Oral Narrative Comprehension and Production Abilities of Verbal Preschoolers on the Autism Spectrum, has a number of implications that I would like to interpret in the context of tools available for narrative intervention. The study involved assessment of preschoolers’ narratives (notably an uninvestigated area for preschool students with autism, according to the article) via presentation of a fictional narrative and administration of comprehension questions and a retelling task. A large grouping within the sample did not produce a retelling that could be analyzed, but the 19 that did were assessed for length, semantic diversity, grammatical complexity and accuracy, intelligibility, inclusion of critical events, and narrative stage. The article notes that most of the research on spontaneous language of preschoolers with autism has focused on free play, rather than the ability to pull language together into narratives...

The 6 Universal Feelings are a research-based model that runs throughout MindWing’s methodology and tools. Through psychological research, the emotions of “happy, sad, mad, scared, disgusted, surprised” have been identified as universally recognizable among human beings, and “hardwired”—so to speak—dating back to ancient efforts to survive in the wild. More sophisticated emotions can be seen to be combinations of these basic feelings, or qualified ones. For example, being “shocked” involves being surprised about an unpleasant event...

I previewed last month that this month’s post would discuss some of those exemplar pairings specifically. Before we crack some books and launch some apps, a word about analyzing contexts. For both books and apps, it can help if they have what I like to call a “Speechie” quality. You can read more about this along with the FIVES criteria (Fairly Priced, Interactive, Visual, Educationally Relevant, Speechie). Breaking down the Speechie part, we can ask ourselves if the book or app is a context for speech and language development: • Does it have a narrative structure that can be used for intervention, considering Story Grammar Marker^® or Braidy the StoryBraid^® as a tool (this includes apps that allow you to make your own choices such that a story unfolds)? • Does it provide or allow you to interact with informational language...

At November’s ASHA convention in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to present several sessions that integrated Story Grammar Marker^® and Thememaker^® with technology resources for narrative development, and wanted to share some of those ideas across a couple of posts (too many for just one)! When preparing to present in the “city of stars,” I thought about incorporating the theme of storytelling and movie-making, which was a great fit. I considered Hollywood’s penchant for sequels, and how that sometimes ultimately goes quite wrong in execution. However, when it comes to picture books, sequels and series are often a hit within language interventions...

Technology, as always, can help us bring contexts to the table, including the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Here is an updated list of tech-based visuals and interactives that can be used to elicit narrative and expository language using Story Grammar Marker^®, ThemeMaker, MindWing’s narrative and expository maps, magnets, and the SGM^® iPad App (still on sale through November for $14.99 in celebration of ASHA Convention). Epic! Books for Kids: This terrific resource offering free educator accounts and a huge variety of e-books (readable on iPad, web or Apple TV), offers some great contexts when you search for “Thanksgiving.” Among these are P is for Pilgrim: A Thanksgiving Alphabet (Crane/Urban), an alphabet book for all ages. Consider using this book to explore two different settings: past and present...

The Toontastic app has long been a good companion for interventions with Story Grammar Marker^®. The original app, released in the early 2010s, was designed with scaffolding in mind, as a “patch,” so to speak, on the problem of decreased play time and increased expectations for students to “write stories” as they reached first grade. Toontastic has undergone some changes after being purchased by Google a few years ago, and is now available as a free “Toontastic 3D” version for both iPad and Android...

Kids love talking about the beach, and so many Kick-Offs can happen in a beach setting! While not everyone is close to a coastal beach, trips to beaches or pools with family are a hallmark of summer, and can be a great context for narrative work during summer sessions or upon return in the fall. Here are a number of technology resources that can serve as contexts and scaffolding for this summer topic. The Toca Life apps, featured here on the MindWing Blog previously, are excellent contexts for any level of narrative development. Toca Life: Vacation features a number of Settings from which you can develop descriptive elaboration: a beach (naturally), airport, and hotel. Toca Life: Town contains several homes...

One helpful strategy in locating apps useful in language intervention is to know and follow (via their Facebook page, Twitter or Website) the developers. We have previously mentioned developers such as Sago Mini, Toca Boca, Social Skill Builder, and LEGO^®. KHAN ACADEMY, the Edtech force known most for distribution of expository video related to curriculum, recently bought the development company Duck Duck Moose, and their terrific apps continue to be offered free of charge. In this post I’ll talk about a few of them, along with great opportunities to use them as a context or context-builder alongside MindWing’s tools for narrative and expository language development...

Last month I visited the MindWing Concepts offices to lead a small group workshop on integrating tech tools with Story Grammar Marker^® and Thememaker^®. One of the biggest topics of interest involved ways to use MindWing’s story and expository maps on laptops, iPads and even within Google Apps, and we spent a chunk of time exploring these possibilities. We thought that this topic could use an update on the blog, so here we go! First of all, some rationale. Why might you want to work with these tools digitally (meaning the files—PDFs—provided with your purchase of any MindWing manual, either via CD-ROM in previous years, or more recently, via a free download code within the manual)? A few reasons:...

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...

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...

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...

Sandbox apps, like the real-life playspace they are named after, allow you to play pretty much however you want within their boundaries. Sandboxes themselves are constrained by the walls of the box, the toys you have and the amount of sand; sandbox apps tend to be bound by a context. Toca Boca has created a series of sandbox apps containing different real-world contexts, the latest being Toca Life: Farm ($2.99 for iPad and other platforms). Toca Life: Farm allows you to play and tell stories within a farm scene, farmhouse, barn and farm store, and the possibilities for Kick-Offs, Plans and Actions are limited only by your imagination...

Story Grammar Marker^® intersects in powerful ways with social learning tools and methodologies such as Social Thinking^®, The Incredible Five Point Scale, and The Zones of Regulation^®. Many of these approaches emphasize situational awareness and understanding of social contexts. Also emphasized in these approaches is the process of “getting” others’ perspectives and the “Landscape of Consciousness” illuminated by discussing Reactions (using an SGM^® Reaction Sequence map) and advancing to target description of Feelings and Plans. Dr. Anna Vagin has carved a niche for exploring the utility of videos in addressing these aspects of narrative language and social cognition, detailed in her books Movie Time Social Learning and YouCue Feelings, which will be discussed in this post...

Halloween and the days around it open up a world of strange and fun stories! Check out these apps to provide a doorway (a creaky one) to developing narrative language. Toontastic (free for iPad) is a fantastic app for all seasons and contexts, but be sure to beware of its Halloween theme! Toontastic is a screen-recording application in which you can select a Setting (or use one of your photos as a background), choose “toys” that include Characters and props, and then create a story. The app scaffolds a “plot mountain” with setup, conflict, etc., but you can use it to create simpler projects. Toontastic includes Settings such as Dracula’s castle, Dr. Crankenstein’s Lab, a spooky graveyard and house, a dark bog, and corresponding Characters to build a story. Once you select a Setting and Characters, tap Start, and the app will record both your movement of the Characters and any language spoken...

In last month’s Tech Tuesday post, we discussed the potential of LEGO^® products in interventions for social cognition and language development. The post focused on the uses of real, hands-on LEGOs for building stories, specifically, using baseplates to collaboratively build a Setting with minifigure characters, with blocks setting the stage for discussion of Actions, Kick-Offs, and Reactions. At the same time, multifunction LEGO blocks provide students with opportunities to apply the Social Thinking^® concepts of “sharing imagination” and “adding thoughts” as they build together. In this post, let’s look at some (mostly) tech-based opportunities to capitalize on students’ interest in LEGO....

For many years, I had viewed my students’ interest in LEGO^® products as having some potential for instruction in social skills and language development. I mean, anything that spurs that much engagement from children can be leveraged for learning, right? However, I struggled around how to structure the use of actual LEGO blocks to create a situation where students were practicing language and social interaction together rather than just doing their own thing. The solution came with a realization that LEGO can be used to have students build and interact around one scene or story, and the essential piece, literally and figuratively, is as simple as a baseplate...

For this month’s Tech Tuesday, I will be discussing the use of a phenomenal and versatile app, Pic Collage, which can be used to make storyboards for books that can be analyzed as Complete Episode Narratives with use of Story Grammar Marker^®. Pic Collage has long been a favorite of mine, and I have written about it previously and presented with MindWing Concepts on its uses.  It seems that every time I sit down with a student, I find a new way to use this app! Pic Collage is a free app that is available for both iPad and Android devices...