MiddleHigh

A fun end-of-year activity or summer school activity is making a Character or Setting Collage! You can use old magazines to cut out “Characters.” They may be pictures of celebrities, political figures, community leaders, animals, cartoons or advertisements with people who remind you of characters from children’s literature. Collages can be done individually by using Maps from the Story Grammar Marker® Manual or Braidy the StoryBraid® manual (below) and pasting the magazine clippings right on to the Map...

Some years ago as an SLP in the elementary school setting, I was informed by a colleague of Isabel Beck’s revolutionary approach to targeting vocabulary. In the book Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Development, co-written with Margaret McKeown and Linda Kucan, the authors describe a methodology for building vocabulary revolving around key principles...

In each of our summer studies posts, we have been looking at recent research articles that may inform your use of Mindwing’s narrative and expository tools as you ease into a new school year. This post will look at a study that examined the expository language of typically developing 5th-9th graders along with their performance on a language elicitation protocol. In this way, the article provided key information about assessment, but also has supportive points for the use of the language structures of ThemeMaker^® both in assessment and intervention.

The Rules of the Game: Properties of a Database of Expository Language Samples (Heilmann and Malone, 2014) was written by two researchers working at the university and school district levels, respectively, in order to summarize their efforts at constructing a database to illuminate language skills for this older age group and serve as a clinical basis of comparison. The full article is available via ASHAWire (ASHA’s electronic publications portal) if you are a member.

In working with SLPs, teachers, other professionals and graduate students around the myriad ways I find Story Grammar Marker® useful in intervention, I often emphasize how narrative is at the crux of language functioning and social cognition. This post will explore this idea with an eye toward the concept of situational awareness, an area we can look at as critical for many of our students with social learning challenges--an appropriate topic for May as it is Better Speech and Hearing Month!

In their article, Social Learning and Social Functioning: Social Thinking's Cascade of Social Functioning, Michelle Garcia Winner and Pamela Crooke describe how awareness of situations serves as the foundation of interactions. Social functioning can then be considered a "cascade" of additional skills such as self-awareness within a situation (and understanding of one's own possible role in the ongoing situation) and abstracting and interpreting the ongoing language and actions of others.

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...

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.