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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...

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^®.

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...

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)...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

For this month’s Technology Tuesday, I wanted to spin off of the previous post and mention new resources relating to the themes of a few of these posts from the MindWing archives. So here is some commentary and additional tools relating to four of our back catalog of posts relating to language learning in the population of students with autism spectrum and related disorders. Aligning SGM^® with The Zones of Regulation, and Tech-Tie-Ins! This post described the key connections between Story Grammar Marker^® and Leah Kuypers’ wonderful and extremely useful Zones of Regulation curriculum. In the post, resources such as Pic Collage were mentioned for making visuals elaborating on emotional vocabulary associate with each Zone, and YouTube Kids for locating video scenes to assist students in identifying Zones and “Triggers” (essentially Kick-Offs) in others...

My previous post discussed the narrative element of setting and the tendency of students on the autism spectrum (or with other language disorders) to leave out details about setting, causing listener confusion. One way to explore the importance of setting is to plan interventions using books with an integral setting- where the setting is key to the motivations of the characters and understanding of the plot.

One of my favorites in this vein is Donald Crews’ Shortcut, the story of a group of cousins who find themselves in unexpected danger after taking a shortcut home. Not only does the book serve as an excellent example of building suspense around a small moment in a personal narrative (great for students working on memoir), it also lends itself to being mapped both on a Setting Map and a literal, visual map to develop storytelling skills...

Over the years I have developed a special interest in collecting and using picture books that are tangential to the classroom curriculum. It’s wonderful to find books that contain touches of our content areas but aren’t “in your face” about it! These books can engage students in a story (and thus help them develop narrative language) while also providing a context to access abstract curriculum areas.

Although many schools cover this topic at different times of year, Spring is a great time for a science unit on the five senses. For younger students, this is a basic overview on how we experience the world though hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch. For older students, these simpler concepts can serve as an entry point to the more difficult intricacies of how the sensory system works. Additionally, May is Better Hearing and Speech Month in the USA and May Month in Canada, so what better time to talk about the sense of hearing, and maybe sync with some lessons about hearing and speech?...

The narrative skill of describing and sequencing actions that can occur within a particular place is so relevant to the classroom curriculum, most recently redefined with the arrival of the Common Core State Standards. The classroom itself is a place where children learn, play, read, write, draw, listen, laugh, and sometimes argue, not necessarily in that order! Nearly every academic topic could be framed as an action sequence, while many children requiring narrative language intervention can get stuck at the previous level of naming, the descriptive sequence. We can help scaffold them to the next level using Story Grammar Marker^® and strategies from MindWing’s recent book, The “Core” of the Core: Using Story Grammar Marker® and Other MindWing Concepts Tools To Support Students in Meeting Grade-Level Common Core State Standards...

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...

This post comes just a little in advance of a timely “holiday!” May the Fourth (Be With You) is a great day to celebrate students’ widespread interest in all things Star Wars. One of my favorite resources over the years has been Jeffrey Brown’s series, which started with Darth Vader and Son. This and other books by Brown require a stretch of the imagination: what if Luke (and other characters) actually grew up with Vader as a father figure?...

Clinicians and educators are always looking for high-interest materials that naturally invite both narrative and expository language use. I lead a session each semester at Boston University in which graduate students in speech-language pathology analyze various picture books for their narrative and expository content. One of the guiding questions is always “What’s your post-activity?”...

As an SLP working in a social educator role, I am frequently asked to process events with my students that have occurred outside of our sessions. I find it particularly helpful to add visual support to these conversations with students, so my go-to is to use sketches of stick figures, movement, word and thought bubbles, along with other situational elements, ala Comic Strip Conversations, an approach originally described by Carol Gray. Teresa Ukrainetz has also been a champion of the value of sketching in strategies such as Stickwriting Stories and Sketch and Speak…

The American Speech‑Language‑Hearing Association (ASHA)’s CRISP Committee (Clinical Research, Implementation Science, and Evidence-Based Practice) has developed a series of nine modules on evidence‑based and best practices assessment, which would serve as a great self-guided study activity as we think about the fall! The site, hosted on ASHA’s Teaching, Learning & Research (TLR) Hub, grabbed my eye since it relates to narrative as a critical aspect of any speech-language assessment, and in particular, MindWing’s tools for supporting these processes, including Story Grammar Marker®...

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...

As many narratives could tell us (think of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” as an extreme example), just because something “has always been done this way” does not mean it shouldn’t be questioned. This month we’ll turn that concept into thinking about standardized tests, too-long THE> determining factor in whether students do or do not receive speech and language interventions, particularly in the public school setting. Without inserting my POV too much into this topic, let’s keep the Summer Study Series focus and take a look at the recent review article published in Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, A Critical Analysis of Standardized Testing in Speech and Language Therapy (Nair, Farah & Cushing, 2023). The authors recount the history of speech and language intervention as dating back to the Middle Ages, with recognition of speech disabilities and efforts to remediate seen in cultures such as ancient India...

Picture books are one of our best and most engaging narrative teaching tools, and I love especially when I find a series to share with my students—and you! Series books allow for special opportunities to establish flow (both contextual and psychological) with similar character behaviors, narrative patterns, and themes. I have long been an admirer of author/illustrator Jon Klassen due to the power of his minimalist illustrations, which are beautiful but also witty, and establish character emotion primarily through exaggerated eye expressions. Recently I discovered he had illustrated a trilogy with Mac Burnett now called the Shape Trilogy, consisting of (in this order, which actually is important), Triangle, Square, and Circle. In these books, we can follow the antics of several shape characters as they interact with friends.

In this penultimate entry in the 2022 Summer Study Series, we’ll explore how the use of tools such as Story Grammar Marker® can gibe with models of instruction and learning. Baron and Yarbel’s (2022, brand new!) An Implicit–Explicit Framework for Intervention Methods in Developmental Language Disorder is a tutorial describing theories of learning related to language disorder and associated modes of intervention. This article explores a neurologically based understanding of how we might learn explicitly: consciously trying to memorize information, facts, or apply skills, vs. implicitly: picking something up naturalistically and without really trying. These ways of learning can inform how we use tools such as SGM^® particularly with young children with language disorders...

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.

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...

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...

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?...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...