Maryellen’s Analysis of Emma’s Sample
The following is an analysis of Emma’s written expression of Too Many Tamales. (See previous blog, Analyze A Narrative Written Sample.) Emma’s third grade teacher considered her to be among the top writers in the class and we agree! We’ve included a typed version of her writing, an analysis and a conference suggestion for use during the Writing Process. In our conferencing points, we included mapping using samples of the Story Grammar Marker® iconic maps. If you are not familiar with our Data Collection tools, we have a wide variety to accommodate student needs and your intervention goals. There are also student tools that will assist students in assessing their own work. Below is a sampling of how I would approach conferencing with Emma...
Analyze A Narrative Writing Sample
In a recent blog for Cinco de Mayo, we posted the analysis of the book, Too Many Tamales. (Previous blog.)
Too Many Tamales is quite complex in terms of its content. The reader needs to be attentive to the illustrations as well as the text itself. Complexity of a text poses challenges to students and instructors alike. There are several measures of complexity of text. They are: Lexile Measures, Qualitative Complexity and Knowledge of the competence of the student as reader/listener in order to match him/her to text and task. (Please see references below for further study.) As instructors and interventionists, we are constantly attentive to these measures...
Story Analysis: “Too Many Tamales”
Thursday is the celebration of Cinco de Mayo, a day commemorating a military victory between Mexican and French forces in 1862, but is now a celebration of Mexican culture, food, and music. May is Better Hearing and Speech Month, which celebrates the contributions of speech/language pathologists world-wide striving to enhance the communication abilities of children and adults of all ages. In keeping with both of these celebrations, we decided to feature the picture book entitled, Too Many Tamales by Gary Soto and Illustrated by Ed Martinez, because of the festive nature of the book as well as the fact that it is a picture book written at the highest level of narrative development...
Hands-On Activities for Beginning, Middle and End of a Story
Asking students to tell or write a story with a beginning, middle, and end is a daunting task for most. Teaching the narrative structure in a developmental fashion using the SGM methodology is a powerful tool to instruct students in language, comprehension, and writing. The SGM® is an iconic-based tool that (developmentally) represents the necessary elements of story grammar and story organization. We have received a great deal of positive feedback on our post from March 29, 2016, Fun Activity to Reinforce the “Kick-Off” using the Kick-Off icon and the book The Doorbell Rang...
Tech Tuesday: Tech Tie-Ins to Autism Awareness Month
For this month’s Technology Tuesday, I wanted to spin off of the previous post and mention new resources relating to the themes of a few of these posts from the MindWing archives. So here is some commentary and additional tools relating to four of our back catalog of posts relating to language learning in the population of students with autism spectrum and related disorders. Aligning SGM® with The Zones of Regulation, and Tech-Tie-Ins! This post described the key connections between Story Grammar Marker® and Leah Kuypers’ wonderful and extremely useful Zones of Regulation curriculum. In the post, resources such as Pic Collage were mentioned for making visuals elaborating on emotional vocabulary associate with each Zone, and YouTube Kids for locating video scenes to assist students in identifying Zones and “Triggers” (essentially Kick-Offs) in others...
Additional Activities for “The River”
For those of you who own a copy of the ThemeMaker Teachers' Manual, you know that one of the novels featured is The River by Gary Paulsen. This novel is a sequel to Hatchet. The River is an excellent book for exploring character development. I recently came across my folder for The River and thought I would share a few additional activities with you before putting it away. One of our sixth grade teachers, Donna Mulligan and I collaborated to present this reading adventure to our students. Six students in her class were on educational plans for reading, two for decoding and comprehension, the others for comprehension skills only. Since all the students had knowledge of and had used the SGM® for several years, it provided the needed scaffolding to support students within the classroom. This also made it easier for flexible groupings of students as the SGM® was so familiar to all and a common language was already established among all participants...