MindWing Concepts Blog

Having just read the biography Who Was Rosa Parks? written by Yona Zeldis McDonough, I gathered five of my favorite SGM Mini-Posters and sat down to create some lessons based upon this wonderful book for elementary school students. The blending of both narrative and expository text structures in this book makes it especially valuable to teach and reinforce the differences in text structures. It would make a wonderful informative read aloud as well as for use with individual student for reports and sharing. The Lexile measure is 700. The author includes two timelines, one showing Rosa Park’s life and the other corresponding to world events of the same years. This is especially helpful to relate to the setting of the biography...

Black History Month Lesson 2

A large focus for us this year is to share how to use Story Grammar Marker^® methodology for both Narrative and Expository text selections. As a manner of best practice, Maryellen Moreau, creator of the Story Grammar Marker^® has always paired narrative and expository texts together in her workshops. Camp (2000) introduced a concept called “twin texts” describing a way to pair books together. “Twin texts” are two books, one fiction and one non-fiction that are presented together in a lesson to get children excited about learning and activate prior knowledge. “Teachers can integrate language arts, science, social studies, and other content areas by using children’s literature as a bridge” (Camp, 2000, p. 400). This pairing of twin texts...

As the MindWing blog has been focusing on using chapter books for older students, in conjunction with narrative and expository development tools, this Tech Tuesday post will also! In this post, we’ll take a look at technology resources that facilitate your access to chapter books. These strategies will enable you to use chapter books more easily as contexts when developing students’ sense of story and informational text structures with MindWing’s Story Grammar Marker^® and Expository maps. Naturally, we’d be conducting educationally relevant interventions even if we selected our own texts for lessons. For example, take this Common Core Standard for 5th Grade Reading...

To date in this gradual analysis of The Big Wave, we have talked about the characters within a geographic setting, one where the physical happenings inherent in a setting such as Japan may involve volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis. This setting also takes into consideration the cultures of those living in the setting. You may elaborate upon these aspects as you wish to build knowledge of the land and its people. When students approach fifth grade, a graphic known as the “Plot Diagram” or the “Plot Mountain” is shown as a way to organize the plot of a story, a chapter, or the events in a novel such as The Big Wave. Shown above is our version from The ThemeMaker Teacher’s Manual...

The month of February is Black History Month, also known as African-American History Month.  It is celebrated yearly in February in the United States and Canada and coincides with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln on February 12 and Fredrick Douglass on February 14. MindWing Concepts would like to contribute to this celebration by posting several lessons to use with the Story Grammar Marker^® and ThemeMaker^® which focus on the contributions and accomplishments of black Americans. These postings will include a little known, but related, story of a Springfield Massachusetts Baseball Team which chose friendship over victory eighty years ago in the American Legion Playoffs...

Session #3: Description of a Tsunami

What is a Tsunami? A Tsunami is a huge wave that is caused by an earthquake or volcano eruption beneath the ocean/sea. There is a sequence of steps making up a Tsunami.

First, the sea bottom (Tectonic Plates) erupts. Next, the tectonic plates split or overlap, and pushing upward, cause the water above the split or overlap to rise in volume. Then, the water comes together to rise above the surface. At first the wave is not noticeable. Finally, the wave grows in height as it approaches the shallower waters of the shore...