MindWing Concepts Blog

My daughter’s book club chose “Wonder” by R.J. Palacio and she recommended it to me. This is a book that would support discussions centering on feelings, living in a community and what it means, developing empathy towards others, and the acceptance of differences, to name a few. The format of the book definitely lends itself to teaching perspective taking. There are many ways to approach this book within classrooms or therapy settings. Of course, the deciding factor would be the goals and objectives for your particular students...

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...

In the early 1970s, I began my work as a Speech/Language Pathologist in the Hartford, Connecticut Public Schools. The department head, Margaret Kennedy, an Iowa native, was trying to entice someone to teach a “Language Disabilities Class” at Dwight School in the South End. Language Disability was the new term in our field at that time. I had just gotten my Master’s Degree at Penn State and had an enlightening summer course in “language disabilities” under my belt. We used Helmer Myklebust’s text entitled Differential Diagnosis of Language Impairments, as our basic text and studied intervention methodologies such as the Association Method, developed at Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, the ITPA, Auditory Discrimination in Depth (now known as Lindamood/Lindamood)...

A recent posting shared on MindWing’s Facebook page (http://tinyurl.com/pierrewhitneyslp) showed a fantastic SGM^® lesson by Whitney Chitty Smith of “Let’s Talk with WhitneySLP,” related to the book, Pierre the Penguin, A True Story, written by Jean Marzollo and illustrated by Laura Regan. After viewing this terrific post (Thank You, Whitney!), I immediately went to the top drawer of my desk and pulled out the book. I had started a blog entry for this book back in November and had never completed it!...

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...

My 2-year-old daughter (and Maryellen’s granddaughter), Casey, loves to watch an old VHS tape of Frosty the Snowman at her grandparents’ house. She gets frustrated when the tape has to be rewound, since she was born into the “magic” of the YouTube and OnDemand era!! She recently got the Golden Book of Frosty and says, “Mommy, can we read Charlie the Snowman?” (I think she gets the name confused with “A Charlie Brown Christmas”!) Reading it with her and singing the Frosty song, which tells the story, reminded me of a lesson that we had posted 10 years ago...