MindWing Concepts Blog

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…

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)...

Maryellen, Sheila, and I have had many conversations about how almost any context can be put into story form with Story Grammar Marker^®! On the flip side, we know that it takes practice and linguistic flexibility to consider what “fits” as each story element, though I often also say that you can’t really do it wrong. There are many ways to tell a story. As the holiday season is upon us, I was thinking about the variety of cultural and religious (or both) observations that take place around this time, and how they tie into the observation of the winter solstice...

I almost dislike writing about gratitude at Thanksgiving time, as it is a practice that is self-regulating all year round. It is well documented that regularly steering our thinking toward gratitude helps override our brain’s negativity bias and train ourselves to notice positive elements of life, with influence on our mood, and therefore our executive functioning. Recent discourse around gratitude has created the term “glimmers,” serving as the opposite of “triggers.” Glimmers are small observations that help calm our nervous systems....