MindWing Concepts Blog

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...

To Maryellen: “Wishing you good luck and true friendship forever!”  This was the inscription that author Martin Nelson Burton wrote in November 2004, on Maryellen’s copy of Dear Mr. Leprechaun, Letters From My First Friendship. This is a delightful, true tale based upon the author’s childhood writings to his leprechaun friend. The original letters and the responses (written by the author’s father, aka The Leprechaun) are presented in the book. On each page, there is a leprechaun that younger children will enjoy searching for. The beautiful artwork of Clint Hansen was created with paper sculpture. The last page of the book gives a brief description of the sculpture process that children and adults will find fascinating...

Are you looking for a way to reinforce SGM icons with students in your small groups? Using the stamps from our Icon Stampede Stamp Activity Set and Post-It Filing Tabs, create a set of icons as shown below. I picked up a clipboard to store them in order. Notice how the set of Post-It notes are green, yellow, and red to correspond to the beginning, middle, and end of a story. Various sizes are available; you may also decide to cut the larger ones in half, depending on your needs. I like the 2 inch by 1½ inch size, as I found them easy to remove...

Our baby cousin Avery
celebrating Dr. Seuss!

This week brings us to an exciting yearly event…

Read Across America Day, March 2nd, created in honor of Dr. Seuss’ birthday. Dr. Seuss—Theodor Seuss Geisel—was born here in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1904 and grew up on Mulberry Street, just a short walk from our MindWing office. We are looking forward to the completion and opening of the Dr. Seuss Museum here in Springfield! It will be such an exciting destination for children as well as adults who grew up loving Dr. Seuss stories! “The more that you read the more things you will know. the more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” With this quote in mind, please enjoy reading and sharing the following links to Seuss-related information!...

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...

Because collaborators come from different points of view in terms of their view of the students’ needs, the contents of this listing may be something to use as a discussion tool fostering collaboration among general education teachers, special education teachers, speech/language pathologists, school adjustment counselors and those focusing on social communication growth!...