Early

In working with SLPs, teachers, other professionals and graduate students around the myriad ways I find Story Grammar Marker® useful in intervention, I often emphasize how narrative is at the crux of language functioning and social cognition. This post will explore this idea with an eye toward the concept of situational awareness, an area we can look at as critical for many of our students with social learning challenges--an appropriate topic for May as it is Better Speech and Hearing Month!

In their article, Social Learning and Social Functioning: Social Thinking's Cascade of Social Functioning, Michelle Garcia Winner and Pamela Crooke describe how awareness of situations serves as the foundation of interactions. Social functioning can then be considered a "cascade" of additional skills such as self-awareness within a situation (and understanding of one's own possible role in the ongoing situation) and abstracting and interpreting the ongoing language and actions of others.

Read the book to the students. Review the character map and the categories with the children. Reread Flossie to the children having them listen to details to use on the Character Map. Pair the children and give them the Character Map to complete. Have them write the character’s name under the character icon.

With the students participating, complete the Character Map with the class showing the pictures and/or reading the text that relate to the each section of the map. This book lends itself very well to this activity as the text is simple and illustrations are wonderful. We have used this activity with students in K-3, modified according to the needs of the grade level.

Below are two samples from second grade students.

Our last blog focused on Mr. Hatch’s feelings in response to three separate kick-offs from Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch.

We used the new Feelings/Kick-Off Map (below) and looked at the back of the Feelings mini-poster for an additional activity that would lend itself to a center activity. Our goal is to develop an understanding of the relationship between the kick-off and feelings of characters that ultimately leads to an awareness of the critical thinking triangle, which motivates the actions of characters. Today, we will expand on our feelings activities...

Earth Day is honored around the world on April 22 for the purpose of shining a light on environmental programs and fostering community activism through a variety of different events and activities. Earth Day is the largest civic event in the world! It is celebrated around the globe by people of all cultures, backgrounds, and nationalities. More than a billion people participate in Earth Day Festivities each year. Up here in New England, it is 70 degrees today (although we still have patches of snow on the ground!!) but the warm weather reminded us that Earth Day will be here before we know it!

Earth Day is a great occasion to introduce the book entitled Winston of Churchill: One Bear's Battle Against Global Warming by Jean Davies Okimoto (Author) and Jeremiah Trammell (Illustrator). This picture book is a combination of narrative and expository text structures. The narrative, or story, is about polar bears planning a protest against environmental factors negatively affecting their habitat in Churchill, Canada. It contains all narrative elements of story grammar as well as perspective taking.

A recent (February 20) MindWing blog contained a link to our Feelings Mini-Poster and a new feelings activity that included a partially completed template unique to The Snow Walker and a blank template for use with other stories of your choice.

The Snow Walker activity used the template with multiple Characters and their perspectives. Today, we will use this same template with a variation to the activity, using it with one Character and multiple Kick-Offs. This will reinforce the concept that a Character has a Feeling in response to a Kick-Off. Our ultimate goal is to lead students to an understanding of the Critical Thinking Triangle. Continuing today from the previous blog with the picturebook Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch we have provided the following partially completed template for today’s activity.

Our recent blog, The Snow Walker, concluded our three-part winter-themed blogs (for this year!). We are hopefully moving towards warmer temperatures, as we begin April. April also begins National Autism Awareness Month. In light of that, throughout the month, our blogs will focus on the development of feelings, perspective taking, theory of mind, and empathy. The Story Grammar Marker^® provides a visual, explicit way of analyzing the motivations, feelings, thoughts/mental states and plans of characters (and of people in real life situations).

Picture books are excellent resources for helping to develop children’s emotional literacy. As educators, we know that combining visual images and text plays a significant role in working with our students. In an article in The Reading Teacher (Vol. 67, Issue 4, December 2013/2014), Maria Nikolajeva writes that “picturebooks are perfect training fields for young people’s theory of mind and empathy.” In this blog, we are going to use the book Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch written by Eileen Spinelli and illustrated by Paul Yalowitz to begin to demonstrate feelings, theory of mind, perspective taking and empathy.