MindWing Concepts Blog

Continuing here with 2021’s Summer Study Series, this post will be a little different. Rather than focusing on analysis of one article for further learning, I’d like to point you in the direction of a few resources related to a theme: mental health and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve all heard and experienced it in some way, at this point almost a cliché; it was a school year like no other. Loss of a feeling of safety, of connection, of experiences, of freedoms, perhaps of health or people in our lives, these all pervade our memories of the past year. I’m of the mindset that every little bit of processing is potentially helpful. However, you may feel uncomfortable or unequipped to go into these topics in personal narrative with your students. For some support, I’d like to point you in a few directions...

Welcome to 2021’s Summer Study Series! From now through August we will be featuring digests of recently published articles that relate to assessment and intervention in narrative and expository language. This month we look at Investigating Adolescent Discourse in Critical Thinking: Monologic Responses to Stories Containing a Moral Dilemma (Wallis, Westerveld, Wallis & Snow, 2021). Notably published in ASHA’s Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools and characteristically practical, this one sure grabbed my eye! The investigators sought to assess older and younger adolescent language performance in response to a moral dilemma task...

Over the past months, I have been working with students online and finding new ways to use this Jamboard  tool...the sky’s the limit! One effective way is to integrate methodologies like Story Grammar Marker^® into the use of Jamboard as a visual support to elicit and scaffold language. Audiobooks from Epic! Audiobooks for Kids can be chosen for short segments or chapters that make for a zone-appropriate lesson blending auditory comprehension with narrative language intervention. You may not be willing to go to bathroom-humor-lengths to engage your students at this point, but I am! So, since they asked for Captain Underpants (Dav Pilkey), I checked it out, and delivered!...

The “Give a Story to Get a Story” technique is one we all know makes sense. We’ve seen what often happens when we ask students to produce a narrative out of the blue. More often than not, we are rewarded with a blank stare! The use of the “Conversational Map,” the formal name for this technique, was first described by Peterson and McCabe (1983) and, in web-accessible articles, adapted by McCabe and Rollins (1994) and Hadley (1998). In my experience, these articles hit on principles applicable when working with preschool, through adult clients, who can all benefit from language scaffolding...

I wanted to know exactly HOW the COVID19 Vaccine worked and WHY you should join our ThemeMaker^® Master Class… Learn how to use ThemeMaker^® for teaching your students informational text by giving them the strategies, modeling, visual supports, and guided, step-by-step practice to handle the cognitive load and deconstruct the information necessary for reading informational texts, answering complex questions, and forming arguments. Read below for an example of this learning process in my life. Imagine one of your students wanting to know this information and navigating this process. Would they have the tools they need to do it?...

Get ready to Jam! This past year, Google introduced the interactive and collaborative tool Jamboard, which could not have come at a better time given the pandemic and our need to engage students via distance learning. Jamboard allows for quick and easy co-creation of visuals in a shared space via addition of images, sketches, text boxes and post-its. Therefore, it is a great venue for making interactive scenes, brainstorming, and generating language on graphic organizers. To access Jamboard, follow the steps you would to get started with any Google tool: go to the “waffle” in the upper right corner of a Google space such as Gmail or Drive, and select Jamboard...