Fall Travels and Topics

This week I want to mention our upcoming professional development trips to San Antonio to Billings to New York City to Denver! The stops on our itinerary show the varied text structures, academic language and social communication applications of our language learning tools.

I am speaking at the Dr. Elizabeth Carrow-Woolfolk Lecture Series on Saturday, October 10, at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. It is an honor to be invited to speak at this event since I have long admired Dr. Carrow-Woolfolk’s contributions as a pioneer in the study of language and reading disabilities. My presentation will center on narrative and expository discourse language development using Story Grammar Marker^® and ThemeMaker^® .

On Monday, I will be presenting at Jackson-Keller Elementary School in San Antonio on Braidy, the StoryBraid^® for use in oral and written academic language development as well as social problem-solving and conflict resolution.

The two-day workshop in Billings, Montana on October 15 and 16 is sponsored by the Montana Speech/Language and Hearing Association (MSHA). The workshop will center on the use of narrative development for social communication using the Story Grammar Marker^® as it applies to children along the autism spectrum. This trip to Montana is nostalgic because in 1995, MSHA invited me to speak at Great Falls. This was the first trip Holly Fidrych and I made outside of New England to provide professional development on the topic of oral and written narrative development and the Story Grammar Marker^® ! It was twenty years ago this year!

The following week, I will be presenting Story Grammar Marker^® and Progress Monitoring to District 75 with New York City Department of Education Speech Language Pathologists.

On October 26-27, I will be co-presenting with area expert in English learners, Ken Pransky, called Discourse, Language and Reaching Struggling Readers, in Northampton, MA.

We finish up the month with workshops with NYCDOE SLPs in Staten Island on narrative and expository text and data collection.

Next up, I am presenting in Denver, Colorado at the American Speech Language Hearing Association Convention in November. We will also be at exhibit booth #943!!

Speaking of ASHA, this week I was invited to speak at ASHA Connections (formerly ASHA Schools) in Minneapolis, MN in July of 2016 — more on this as it develops! I think this speaking invitation by ASHA is a cause for celebration since 2016 is the year the Story Grammar Marker^® will by twenty-five years old!!

For more information about attending the presentations:

• San Antonio on Saturday, click here: http://tinyurl.com/moreauwoolfolklecture
• Billings, MT next week, click here: http://www.mshaonline.org/msha-fall-convention/
• Northampton, MA on October 26-27, click here: http://tinyurl.com/discourselanguagereaders