MiddleHigh

Project-Based Learning (PBL) is a recent trend in educational design, and involves presenting students with real-world contextual tasks that relate to curriculum areas. PBL is a great approach for Speech-Language Pathologists and Special Educators to employ as our students benefit from having their learning relate to personally relevant and functional content. To learn more about PBL, watch this great video from Common Craft. One tool that has been integrated as a kind of PBL is the “Webquest,” a set of web pages that outline a task and provide web-based resources for its completion. Webquests are not new, and teachers have been developing them for some time. There is a particular Webquest that I wanted to share with you in this post, particularly because it is one you could use in classroom, small group, or even individual language therapy while integrating Story Grammar Marker® and Thememaker® tools in the process...

In the Northeast at least, February means school vacation week, and who doesn’t like Disney? Disney’s parks are based on its countless characters and, of course, narratives, and the company recently released a FREE iPad app that allows children to explore Disneyland. Disneyland Explorer (iPad only) provides a touch-navigable visual environment allowing kids to visit a huge variety of themed settings (Adventureland, Critter Country, Fantasyland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, and so on, and that’s only in Disneyland proper) as they tap to reveal additional photos, videos and music. The app is naturally designed to lure tourists to Disney’s parks, but in the process it provides a primer in the element of Setting, providing a context for clinicians to develop students ability to describe locations, themes, and even genres...

At the elementary school level, we all can attest to seeing students who, narratively, get stuck at what we might call the “andthenandthenandthen” stage. The official name for this stage is the Action Sequence, and it is comprised of Characters, Settings, and a series of Actions with little variation in conjunction use. These students benefit from structures and contexts to move them into using to more complex story elements and cohesive ties such as when, because, and so. Mindwing’s narrative maps, particularly the Reactive Sequence and Abbreviated Episode Maps can provide that structure: (*Maps can be found in the Story Grammar Marker® Teachers’ Manual and the Talk to Write, Write to Learn™ Teachers’ Manual )...

SLPs and teachers working in language intervention often turn to wordless picture books as a fun context to develop storytelling skills. Series such as Mercer Mayer’s “A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog...” tell stories through pictures and ask readers to tease out the story, inferring the important details and relying on characters’ facial expressions to glean important clues. Similarly popular are David Wiesner’s Tuesday and Sector 7, which depict narrative through fantastical illustrations, and Alexandra Day’s “Carl” series, in which a dog goes to great, un-dog-like lengths to care for his charge, a little girl named Madeleine. I have long been a fan of using such visual narrative materials with students, not only to develop storytelling skills...

Over on my blog SpeechTechie this month, I am discussing in a series of posts the incredibly useful technique of using QR codes in language interventions. QR codes, which look like this (at left) were born in the world of marketing (you may have seen them on ads about town) but are making their way into educational settings as an attention-grabbing tool. QR codes can be created very easily and printed, then scanned with free apps available for your smartphone or iPad. When scanned, the app will show text that you entered or a link to a website...

Recently in the Mindwing Blog I featured the Story Patch iPad app, which allows students to create stories according to provided structures or from scratch, resulting in a text and picture-based booklet.

I wanted to follow up that post with a different digital storytelling app that provides an easy means to create and publish dynamic animated stories with spoken audio and music! The app I speak of is Toontastic (an absolute BARGAIN at $1.99), whose creators at Launchpad toys have sought to bridge the gap created when students who primarily express themselves through play are suddenly expected to write stories (i.e. that gap we call “First Grade”). Toontastic uses the iPad’s multitouch interface...