MiddleHigh

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...

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)...

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....

Happy Summer! Each year we set aside these few months on the blog to explore some recent research articles and literature that have relevance to MIndWing’s tools and narrative and expository language supports. This month we check out the first of a two-part article discussing game-based learning (GBL), a popular approach for engagement in classrooms, which can be found at Getting Serious About Games: Exploring How Game-Based Learning Is Used in Education and Therapy. The piece has many points that relate to how games can be used as a language and learning context...

I have often thought that although assessment materials—including SLAM (School Aged Language Assessment) cards offered by the Leaders Project—offer great baseline or progress monitoring tools, it would be great to have something similar for treatment. I have been continually impressed by the materials the graduate students I work with at Boston University create with Slides Go, so I wanted to tell you about this great resource! Slides Go is designed to provide Google Slides or PowerPoint templates, generally to adults making presentations. Sounds boring, right? HOWEVER, the templates include adorable cartoon-like sets that are very appealing to young students...