MindWing Concepts Blog

From twinkling lights and festive decor to excited students counting down the days, there's an undeniable energy that fills the classroom this time of year. As teachers, SLPs, specialists, and parents, though, the holidays often come with “double dip” feelings of—joy and stress, combined with the hustle of balancing lessons, holiday events, and end-of-year tasks. Amidst it all, it’s easy to feel like you’re racing against the clock. But what if you could slow things down just enough to create meaningful holiday-themed learning experiences?

Continuing on an artificial intelligence (AI) track this month, I was curious recently whether any tools have surfaced that specifically relate to creating stories. Creating a story about a timely, curriculum-related, or personally relevant topic is, of course, an activity that can create a great context for analyzing the result with Story Grammar Marker^® and applying its icons to language mapping. AI tools are also fun to play around WITH students and can be used metalinguistically with prompts to the tool to use specific story elements...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are becoming more prevalent, powerful, and integrated in our daily lives. While this is on some level SPOOKY, given the tasks they can perform as well as the potential for abuse, they offer amazing opportunities to create with our students if used carefully. The creative power stems from the relatively recent dawn of “Generative” AI, which can compose materials in the form of text, images (previously discussed here and here) or even music, the topic of today’s post...

With the school year back in full swing, our posts will resume highlighting simple tools, tech or non-tech, that we can use to teach about narrative and expository language in conjunction with MindWing’s methodology. In the past, I have highlighted the now-simpler Google Earth and wanted to revisit this topic in the light of some recent sessions I have had with students. Though Google Earth initially was a complicated downloadable application, it has evolved into a web version accessible by simply navigating to it in your browser (earth.google.com).

In this 4th and final entry in the Summer Study Series for 2024, we will circle back to the expository side of language. Teresa Ukrainetz has always been one of my go-to experts on a number of aspects of discourse, and literally wrote the book on “Conceptualized Language Intervention.” It was with some excitement that I discovered her recent article, “Evidence-Based Expository Intervention: A Tutorial for Speech-Language Pathologists” (2024).

With this 3rd entry in 2024’s Summer Study Series, we look at a recent article that promotes neurodiversity-affirming approaches and how narrative language intervention fits within this recent topic. To offer a simplification, the neurodiversity movement has emerged in recent years as autistic individuals aged toward adulthood. Social media in particular has given autistic culture an amplified voice, and this population has expressed opinions about their educational experiences and what has been helpful, and in some cases, harmful to them...