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Barnett’s stories are playful, visual, and funny. Whether it’s the humor in Oh, No! and Oh, No (Not Again), or the adventure and irony of Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, these books present many narrative and expository opportunities with Story Grammar Marker^®, Thememaker^®’s expository maps, and, of course, visual tools such as magnets and digital icons. What sets many of these books apart is the way they use visual cues, nonverbal behavior, and subtle character plans—a perfect match for SGM^® icons that help students recognize story structure and the “landscape of consciousness” (characters’ plans, mental states, and feelings)...

Sketch and Speak works like it sounds, scaffolding students’ use of pictography, or quick sketches, to visualize details of an expository passage, followed by their oral description. This process has terrific synergy with MindWing’s methodology and materials, particularly ThemeMaker, as structural comprehension approaches (i.e. ,analyzing List, Sequence, Description, Compare-Contrast, and other structures) go hand-in-hand with developing understanding of the expository content. In fact, MindWing’s Expository Maps go so well with this strategy, they can literally be used as the space for it.

Happy Summer! Each year we set aside these few months on the blog to explore some recent research articles and literature that have relevance to MIndWing’s tools and narrative and expository language supports. This month we check out the first of a two-part article discussing game-based learning (GBL), a popular approach for engagement in classrooms, which can be found at Getting Serious About Games: Exploring How Game-Based Learning Is Used in Education and Therapy. The piece has many points that relate to how games can be used as a language and learning context...

In this Autism Acceptance Month, it’s more important than ever to hear the voices coming out of the neurodiversity movement and those of our students themselves. With many autistic individuals growing up and sharing via social media and other channels what has and hasn’t worked in their education, we have some affirming shifts that we can make, for sure. One angle that I always try to take is incorporating my students’ interests in sessions. This helps our activities to be engaging and context-driven, but also incorporates client values, a pillar of evidence-based practice. A teenage client of mine has shown a burgeoning interest in rock music and The Beatles in particular. It occurred to me immediately that many Beatles’ songs tell a story, so that was a great place to start. One of the key things I love about technology is that it can make context immediately available...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

As the MindWing blog has been focusing on using chapter books for older students, in conjunction with narrative and expository development tools, this Tech Tuesday post will also! In this post, we’ll take a look at technology resources that facilitate your access to chapter books. These strategies will enable you to use chapter books more easily as contexts when developing students’ sense of story and informational text structures with MindWing’s Story Grammar Marker^® and Expository maps. Naturally, we’d be conducting educationally relevant interventions even if we selected our own texts for lessons. For example, take this Common Core Standard for 5th Grade Reading...

As stated so well in It’s All About The Story, Book I of MindWing’s Autism Collection, “Tuning into one’s own Feelings as well as the Feelings of Others is extremely problematic to children with autism. The book provides visual flip charts, discussion prompts and an introduction to the Six Universal Feelings (happy, sad, mad, scared, surprised and disgusted), as well as ways to move beyond those Universal categories to more advanced feelings vocabulary—all of these resources give SLPs a great place to start...

A thought balloon is a very valuable tool. It provides a visual scaffold that opens doors to that “landscape of consciousness” that is characteristic of the later stages of the narrative developmental sequence (stages 4-7). As such, it’s the gateway to perspective-taking! I’ve become enamored with Story Grammar Marker’s thought balloon icon, accessed among other ways through MindWing’s Digital Icons Set and The Critical Thinking Triangle in Action. Working with neurodiverse clients, this icon provides a key cue toward using mental state verbs and adeptness with reading others’ thoughts and intents...

This past ASHA Convention in Seattle, my friends and colleagues Meghan Graham and Caroline Brinkert from Boston University discussed the importance of language sampling in supporting student growth, specifically in preschool. They also described barriers to language sample analysis, including time investment and clinicians’ uncertainty and lack of confidence in their skills for this kind of assessment. Truly, the time factor was always a big deal. Recording, playing, and rewinding cassette tape recordings, as we typed out a sample, gave way to doing the same with digital recordings on our phones and iPads, saving little time. AI transcription utilizes Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology, which is based on language and learning models that interpret human speech and convert a recording into text.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has entered a new phase with the recent arrival of generative AI, which can be used to create content rather than just sort existing data. This has resulted in the release of tools such as ChatGPT, which is simple to use and query for all kinds of language content. Just log in with your Google account and you are good to go! Of course, with ChatGPT able to generate any kind of information and write in a wide variety of styles, there are concerns about its use as a workaround for schoolwork. Teachers do have tools to detect AI writing, and a specific SLP’s take is that this kind of AI clears the way for us to work on higher level skills. For now, it’s a good tool to explore. Consider the ways that ChatGPT specifically could be used to generate stories using specific Characters, Settings or Kick-Offs in order to emphasize story elements with Story Grammar Marker^®. It also can be used to create text that corresponds to various expository text structures such as List, Sequence, and Description and thereby be used with ThemeMaker^®’s Information structures and Maps...

Being told what to do is often no fun. But for many of us targeting language development objectives, we have to deal with our students’ potentially low scores on assessments such as the CELF-5s Following Directions subtest. Key to success on activities such as these are student’s listening skills and understanding of concepts related to time, space, number, and sequence, among others. The good news is that these concepts are everywhere and can be targeted through stories and play! One way I have been approaching this is through the Toca Life: World app, previously discussed here. The app is available for multiple platforms as you can see, and you can either purchase individual “Settings” (e.g. Toca Life: Vacation, which I like to refer to with colleagues as The White Lotus), or connect purchased apps through the World app. The World app also has mini-settings you can purchase for short money, for example, a ski resort. I have been using the book Where’s Walrus? by Stephen Savage with students recently (video here) (recall: using picture books on YouTube can work wonderfully with heavy use of the pause button)...

Story Grammar Marker^® provides visual support for understanding and forming narrative, but part of its work depends on students ascribing meaning to its icons. Helping students internalize these visuals, their connections and meanings can take some review, and the more fun, the better! Here are a few tech-infused ways to drill-play the SGM® icons! Use a Slideshow! Google Slides can be a great way to make a digital “manipulative” for review. Pick a personal narrative or reviewed story to talk through, then use the Slideshow mode as a “quiz” on the icons alone or linked to contextualized story elements (e.g. “Kick-Off- the Bear’s kick-off was that someone stole his hat!”)...

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...

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...

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...

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:...

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...

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...

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...

• Narrative language has many social impacts as well as listening and reading comprehension, and, of course, involves the story-based language of responding orally in class and producing writing...

This month we will discuss the acclaimed Zones of Regulation^® program and dovetailing with narrative instruction through Story Grammar Marker^®. All students must develop self-regulation skills for living and learning, an area defined by author Leah Kuypers as “the best state of alertness of both the body and emotions for the specific situation” (Kuypers, 2011). However, students with language-learning disorders and autism spectrum and related disorders can exhibit more significant struggles with managing their mind and body given their communication needs, as well as other factors such as sensory processing...

Every year during the Superbowl, a few commercials stick out from the sea of repetitive beer, snack food, and summer blockbuster ads.  This past year, one of the best was Google’s Parisian Love ad, which told the story of an American’s romance with a French woman in a simple and brilliant way, as an unseen character “Googled” various search terms that reflected events in his life.  A follow-up ad about a girl switching schools, which I never saw aired, would be even more relatable for kids and is definitely a great model of a complete episode.

These commercials were so popular that Google created a wonderful tool that allows users to make their own Search Stories. Simply pick your search terms and the type of search you want shown in your movie (e.g. web, image, product, map, etc), select the music and upload to a YouTube account (if you have Gmail, you already have a YouTube account)...

In May, as we celebrate Better Hearing and Speech Month, we look to promote awareness of communication in all its forms, which includes storytelling and discourse. As we close out the month, we wanted to suggest an app that promotes dialogue about communication (and provides a source of expository text), aligns with MindWing’s Thememaker Maps, and suggests a twist on using the SGM® iPad App!

The  San Francisco Exploratorium’s free Sound Uncovered app for iPad provides a wealth of information about hearing and sound...

This month’s post is a support for you and your students’ brains as we get deeper into this new school year. I have tried to make a habit of bibliotherapy, the practice of consuming books— literature or the more “self-help” type—that connects you to emotional regulation and growth. This month, I am reading Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence by Dr. Rick Hanson and I see such a connection to narrative language and Story Grammar Marker!...

As an SLP, I have always loved working with vocabulary development. Unlocking new words for students is so demonstrably gratifying. We can imagine that they will encounter new words later in their listening, reading, or general daily experiences with confidence, and hopefully find them to be tools to express themselves and even solve problems. Vocabulary is also an easy channel to target in the course of narrative intervention, context being a key to word learning. Targeted vocabulary can be part of the microstructure elements we emphasize...