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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.

The MindWing Narrative and Expository Maps are to me an invaluable part of the visual language tools within the Braidy the StoryBraid^®, Story Grammar Marker^®, and ThemeMaker^® programs. Of course the SGM iPad App gives you one option to work with the icons in these programs digitally while scaffolding language development--but it’s not the only way!

Google Apps for Education is a resource that is now implemented in many public school districts, allowing for digital creation, storage, sharing, and collaboration on word processing and other types of documents. The power of Google Apps (a.k.a. “Drive” or “Docs” — they all pretty much mean the same thing) is that it gives you access to your files from any computer or device, and allows you to share important information between key staff members without handing off any paper! If your district has not implemented Google’s tools, you can also access all of them for free with a Google account (i.e. if you have a Gmail, you can just navigate to your Google Drive). Click on the “matrix” of squares in any Google account to navigate between apps, including Google Drive...

Our winter theme is expanding in literature as well as in real life here in New England. From blogs containing twelve episodes of Frozen to Owl Moon to the recent Blizzards of 2015, we have chosen two versions of the same story reflecting a winter theme.

The Snow Walker
(On My Own History)

By Margaret K. Wetterer and Charles M. Wetterer (Authors)
Mary O'Keefe Young (Illustrator)
Carolrhoda Books (Lerner)
Minneapolis, MN: 1996
ISBN: 978-0876149591

The Snowshoeing Adventure of Milton Daub, Blizzard Trekker
(History's Kid Heroes)

By Margaret K. Wetterer and Charles M. Wetterer (Authors)
Emma Carlson Berne (Adapter), Zachary Trover (Illustrator)
Graphic Universe (Lerner)
Minneapolis, MN: 2010
ISBN: 978-0761361947

Snowy evenings often inspire poets, musicians and writers. One that I love is Robert Frost’s famous poem entitled Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. I have a beautiful copy of this poem with illustrations by Susan Jeffers. This poem happens to be an exemplar poem listed in Appendix 2 of the Common Core State Standards. The last page of the book has a note written by the illustrator about her mother, an artist, who would take her daughter for walks on snowy evenings: “My mother’s favorite thing to do was simply to walk outside and look. She was a painter and my first painting lessons came from her. They were really lessons in looking. She would ask me: What is the color of the tree shadow? Is it blue? Blue- green” Violet? She was teaching me to paint what I saw, not what I knew. What I knew would never be enough.” Color often is a clue to the author’s, poet’s or illustrator’s theme. Robert Frost’s poem, so beautifully illustrated in this version, reminded me of Owl Moon by Jane Yolen and illustrated by John Schoenherr, due to similarities of the winter night’ setting, the owls and the mention of colors...

It is an animated movie with not one, but TWO princesses. The Prince is a villain, the person with the magical powers is actually “good.” The act of true love that saves the day is not a kiss from a prince, but rather one sister sacrificing herself for another sister. It is a plot driven by love in a family, rather than solely by a romance (but there is just enough romance to keep us hopeful). It is the 5th highest grossing film of all time and the #1 animated film of all time. It won Academy Awards and Golden Globes. It is relatable, empowering, and filled with Kick-Offs, Feelings, Plans, Mental States, Consequences and Resolutions with very strong characters and constantly changing settings. It is Disney’s phenomenon, Frozen.

Last week, we presented Frozen in a workshop entitled Story Grammar Marker®, ThemeMaker® and Data Collection that was presented to 800 SLPs in NYC’s Board of Education. Videos of story retellings were shown using clips from Disney’s Frozen and an extensive narrative analysis was shared as well. Coincidentally, one of Advanceweb’s latest blogs (http://community.advanceweb.com/blogs/sp_2/archive/2014/12/29/using-disney-s-frozen-in-speech-therapy.aspx) focused on Frozen. So, this is perfect timing for you to receive the Story Grammar Marker® Narrative Analysis of 12 episodes (scenes) from Frozen. Click here for the FREE download!

When you look at the narrative analysis, please pay particular attention to the elements of the Critical Thinking Triangle®: kick-offs, feelings, plans and mental states that are so integral to this story. Different episodes are taken from perspectives of different characters. Notice how we have fleshed out the Mental States to help children think about the motivations of characters – what do they believe, realize, remember, think and know. Frozen is rich with mental states – and it is there that this story holds it’s magic. What does Elsa realize about her powers? What does Anna think about Elsa shutting her out? What does Kristoff believe about Anna’s feelings for Hans? What does Hans understand about the sisters’ relationship? What does Elsa remember about her childhood – and how does that motivate her plans throughout the whole story? What does Anna realize and believe that helps her make the decision to save Elsa?

This exciting and engaging story (that is quite familiar to most of us) makes it easy to see how to elaborate and expand the elements of the Critical Thinking Triangle®. Our hope is that you will use this analysis in your therapy or classroom, but also use it as a model for analyzing other movies, stories, books or novels.

Maryellen Rooney Moreau presented last weekend at Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking Providers’ Conference in San Francisco. In 2003, Winner stated: “Perspective taking is needed for social interaction, academic success and personal problem-solving as an adult.” Social Thinking, the work of Winner, heavily focuses on perspective-taking. Maryellen’s presentation, meant to exemplify this statement, was called Let’s Think About It! Perspective-taking And The Thought Process Of Opinion/Argument Using The Story Grammar Marker®. In her presentation she covered the following topics:

• Narrative development in relation to perspective taking
• Speaking and listening Common Core State Standards and narrative development
• The role of mental models and social emotions in perspective taking
• The Situation Model and the Story Grammar Marker®
• Critical thinking and its relation to perspective-taking and argument
• The shift to Expository text structures in ELA due to the Common Core State Standards
• Thinking about, planning and writing opinion & argument