MindWing Concepts Blog

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...

The article discussed this month interested me in particular because, although in private practice and university settings currently, I have a long history as a school-based SLP. As my caseload grew, I found huge value in forging partnerships with teachers to deliver a portion of services in their classrooms with co-led lessons, or simply taking the lead for 30 minutes a week. The teachers appreciated my efforts to tie in with curriculum topics and also providing them with tangible strategies they could carry over with students to support their language development.

In my work with students, I have become particularly interested in incorporating that beautiful thought bubble icon on Story Grammar Marker®. I find it an elegant icon, serving to scaffold both complex language (I remembered that it was the last week of school contains an embedded clause) and perspective taking, a skill endorsed by advocates of neurodiversity affirming approaches. For this month’s post, I traced a source through Anna Vagin’s work, as she has also provided many resources on working with mental state verbs (MSVs)...

SLP and social educator Anna Vagin has provided a wealth of resources that overlap wonderfully with MindWing’s methodologies in narrative language development. Through her website workshops, and terrific FREE mailing list, she shares connections to fostering conversational language, using engaging contexts such as games and animations to build social cognition, and recently, a new perspective on using visually supportive cognitive/emotional scales. Scales are a tried-and-tested tool for expanding thinking, linked to counseling approaches such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Motivational Interviewing (MI)...

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?...