MindWing Concepts Blog

Valentine’s Day approaches! It’s a great time to target students’ understanding of feelings as described in It’s All About The Story, Book I of Mindwing’s Autism Collection! The Feelings icon is, of course, a heart, a common symbol of this holiday. You can use this book’s introduction to the Six Universal Feelings (happy, sad, mad, scared, surprised and disgusted), or Feelings in general as emphasized in the Story Grammar Marker program, along with the two resources presented in the screencast below, to develop students’ narrative language and perspective taking abilities. The screencast describes how to use a resource that almost everyone has access to- Microsoft PowerPoint- and also provides an overview of an interactive poetry generator. Having students make a Valentine for a special person in their lives can be an important way to show they are “thinking about” others and use some great language skills...

As stated so well in It’s All About The Story, Book I of MindWing’s Autism Collection, “Tuning into one’s own Feelings as well as the Feelings of Others is extremely problematic to children with autism. The book provides visual flip charts, discussion prompts and an introduction to the Six Universal Feelings (happy, sad, mad, scared, surprised and disgusted), as well as ways to move beyond those Universal categories to more advanced feelings vocabulary—all of these resources give SLPs a great place to start...

I have a 6.5 year old son who has high functioning Autism. His Test of Narrative Language is at 3% for both receptive and expressive components. I introduced the Story Grammar Marker^® to him this week and we went over the book “Big Al” by Andrew Clements together a couple of times, as described in your new book “It’s All About the Story.” I am thrilled to tell you that at dinner time a couple of days later, we were talking about our “ho-hum” day, and I mentioned to my husband that I got a headache in the morning. My son took over and said: “That was a kick-off!” I was shocked to see how quickly he grasped the tool that he calls “Grandma's Story Marker” :-)...

Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known to the world as Dr. Seuss, was born in 1904 on Howard Street in Springfield, Massachusetts – which is right around the corner from MindWing’s office. The Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden is located at the Springfield Museums near our office as well. The influence of Ted’s (Dr. Seuss’) memories of Springfield can be seen throughout his work.

In keeping with the spirit of the holiday season, we wanted to share a lesson idea from MindWing’s book: East Meets West for the Holidays by Maryellen Rooney Moreau and Judy K. Montgomery. This lesson is based on one of Dr. Seuss’ most beloved holiday stories: How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Using the holidays as a context for language interventions can be tough, as it’s important to be inclusive of all cultures and celebrations. From a technology perspective, there just aren’t many great interactive resources about the Festival of Lights (anyone want to make some)? Gingerbread, however, while associated loosely with Christmas, is probably fair game in the public school setting!

Now, while websites with excessive, distracting ads are often something I rule out as a potential therapy resource, sometimes sites that are actually a giant, yet somehow unobtrusive ad can be great...