MindWing Concepts Blog

“If you’re happy and you know, clap your hands!” How many of us remember and still occasionally sing this old camp song? There are many versions of this song on YouTube that you could access as a jumping off point for a similar activity to the one described below or you may use books of your choosing if you cannot find the two books below in your local library. Read or sing If You’re Happy and You Know It by Jane Caberra to your students for enjoyment. Make a list of all the actions/activities mentioned in the book on the white board...

Earth Day is Friday, April 22, 2016! We have chosen five of our favorite book titles for this day to share with you. Clicking on any of the titles will take you to a description found on Amazon.

Also, please enjoy this Free Downloadable for your students to use to reinforce the SGM^® Setting icon and Earth Day!

Create a bulletin board of ideas entitled… The Setting, Our Earth is Ours to Care For!...

For this month’s Technology Tuesday, I wanted to spin off of the previous post and mention new resources relating to the themes of a few of these posts from the MindWing archives. So here is some commentary and additional tools relating to four of our back catalog of posts relating to language learning in the population of students with autism spectrum and related disorders. Aligning SGM^® with The Zones of Regulation, and Tech-Tie-Ins! This post described the key connections between Story Grammar Marker^® and Leah Kuypers’ wonderful and extremely useful Zones of Regulation curriculum. In the post, resources such as Pic Collage were mentioned for making visuals elaborating on emotional vocabulary associate with each Zone, and YouTube Kids for locating video scenes to assist students in identifying Zones and “Triggers” (essentially Kick-Offs) in others...

For those of you who own a copy of the ThemeMaker Teachers' Manual, you know that one of the novels featured is The River by Gary Paulsen. This novel is a sequel to Hatchet. The River is an excellent book for exploring character development. I recently came across my folder for The River and thought I would share a few additional activities with you before putting it away. One of our sixth grade teachers, Donna Mulligan and I collaborated to present this reading adventure to our students. Six students in her class were on educational plans for reading, two for decoding and comprehension, the others for comprehension skills only. Since all the students had knowledge of and had used the SGM^® for several years, it provided the needed scaffolding to support students within the classroom. This also made it easier for flexible groupings of students as the SGM^® was so familiar to all and a common language was already established among all participants...

Another story that I frequently used in kindergarten and first grade for development of the concept of the Setting was Bear Feels Scared by Karma Wilson. As always, read the book for enjoyment with the children. Then, choose any of the following ideas and modify them to meet the needs of your students. 1. Elicit words from the students to describe the setting of the woods. The text and illustrations will give plenty of ideas. Use the SGM Magnets as shown at right, creating an expository list map. 2. A simple project—easy for you to create—to further form this connection between the SGM icon and “Setting” term is shown below. Students may copy words from the list or you might want to have them written out for them, depending on the child(ren). The star icon is found on page 140 of the Braidy the StoryBraid manual...

In recognition of Autism Awareness Month, we would like to share with you 31 Blog Posts, Free Lessons, Webinars and Videos that focus on social communication which can be used to help children along the Autism Spectrum. The themes in these blogs/lessons/videos/webinars are perspective-taking, social problem solving, critical thinking, social emotions, theory of mind, story-telling and more! In addition to these FREE resources, for the month of April our Autism/Social Communication Collection is $50 OFF! The sale price is $99.95 for the whole collection (normally $149.95)! We want to give you the chance to use this kit of materials with the population of students who can benefit from it most...