Clinicians and educators are always looking for high-interest materials that naturally invite both narrative and expository language use. I lead a session each semester at Boston University in which graduate students in speech-language pathology analyze various picture books for their narrative and expository content. One of the guiding questions is always “What’s your post-activity?” How can this book be used to engage and to practice key academic skills such as mapping the story (or on the expository side, the List, Sequence, Description, Compare-Contrast, and so on)? Another target in the workshop is exemplifying materials that are useful in grabbing the attention of older students, while using methodologies such as Story Grammar Marker^® and ThemeMaker^®.

Subpar Parks: America’s Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors by Amber Share offers a unique, fun, and humorous example, with many possible post-activities, along with narrative and expository mapping. Share “entered the chat” through her hilarious Instagram, where she started sharing beautiful vector art of national (and later, international and other) parks inspired by one-star Yelp reviews complaining about the user’s experience visiting these natural treasures. These posts were compiled in her first book, combined with brief, readable text passages on each park, creating a great opportunity to explore perspective, story grammar, and expository structures in meaningful and memorable ways.

As a National Park nerd, I was “naturally” drawn to this content. At its core, Subpar Parks juxtaposes two contrasting perspectives: the awe-inspiring reality of national parks and the often comically negative interpretations of visitors who were apparently expecting something else. Students are naturally drawn to the humor (“Too cold!” “Too many rocks!”), relatable examples of complaints the students themselves might pose about long road trips. At the same time, the content invites thinking about the schema of National Park Settings while exploring expository text, as well as finding narratives and exposition in social media.

Each entry provides an opportunity to build the hidden story behind the review:

Students could be guided to contrast the review in question with others on Yelp or TripAdvisor, thus practicing exploring a range of narrative and expository texts. This aligns well with social cognition and flexible thinking goals, encouraging students to recognize that the same situation can generate very different stories.

Additional activities could include researching news stories from the same park, or imagining them, and creating alternate subpar or par stories. It would be easy to create images similar to the subpar park reviews with a Google Slides Template, along with using MindWing’s Digital Icons to elaborate on stories and explanations.

Try this template (File link) Make a Copy to save to your drive, click Background to search for Google Images to replace this Acadia Beehive trail photo, and change the text.

The national parks provide a natural context for teaching descriptive and expository text structures with MindWing’s Maps, particularly according to these attributes:

• Category: National park
• Location: State/region
• Features: Mountains, geysers, deserts, forests
• Climate: Hot, cold, wet, dry
• Wildlife: Animals and ecosystems
• Activities: Hiking, camping, sightseeing, swimming, rafting

Additional ideas:

• Google provides “virtual field trips” to National Parks!
• Use books on Epic Books for Kids! for additional expository text
• Take a quiz on the locations of the National Parks
• Create Yelp reviews of other locations and experiences using this Google Slides template

Have fun exploring the parks! Well, more fun than the reviewers in question…

Maryellen previously demonstrated this connection between story and self-regulation in this video, but in this post, I will describe a recent example.

I find it particularly helpful to add visual support to these conversations with students, so my go-to is to use sketches of stick figures, movement, word and thought bubbles, along with other situational elements, ala Comic Strip Conversations, an approach originally described by Carol Gray. Teresa Ukrainetz has also been a champion of the value of sketching in strategies such as Stickwriting Stories and Sketch and Speak.

A recent situation in which I supported a young child was for “regulating his silly” at school. For this kindergartener, morning meetings could stretch his regulatory tolerance, and he would respond by attempting to connect with peers through silly actions. Additionally, the dynamic in the class developed with friendships with other kids who would “tempt” him to be silly at the wrong times. A Comic Strip Conversation helped open his thinking to other perspectives and the “WHY” of this situation, strategies he might use, and his understanding of consequences.

Describing the flow of the conversation with this youngster as we drew will help clarify this drawing:

1. We started by describing how morning meeting can feel a bit long and that as a result, sometimes we or classmates (characters) get a bit silly. The child wanted to attribute this behavior to a classmate and gave an example of yelling out “6-7” (you likely know the recent meme/”brainrot” language).
2. I gently detailed how I had heard of some silly behavior on the client’s part, which led to the involvement of other characters—his parents. The drawing on the top right was part of our exploration of how that behavior in class led to his parents receiving emails. We used sketched emojis to talk about how they might feel about an email describing disruptive behavior.
3. In the center of the image, we detailed actions/consequences that happen at home as a result of reports from school, e.g., restricted screen time.
4. Connected to this situation was the perspective of teachers and the client’s mom— and the client himself—that a classroom friend can sometimes pull him into being silly. We talked about the social concept of the Silly Tornado (Social Thinking^®) and what some actions/language scripts could be for telling a friend we don’t want to get “pulled in.”

This story took some review and discussion of “same but different” situations over the following weeks, but overall it was helpful, and provided a strategy so simple (story+sketch) the parent could replicate it at home! For more information on Comic Strip Conversations, read the book by Gray or check out the many tutorials available on YouTube.

Picture books are more than literacy tools

Barnett’s stories are playful, visual, and funny. Whether it’s the humor in Oh, No! and Oh, No (Not Again), or the adventure and irony of Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, these books present many narrative and expository opportunities with Story Grammar Marker^®, ThemeMaker^®’s expository maps, and, of course, visual tools such as magnets and digital icons.

What sets many of these books apart is the way they use visual cues, nonverbal behavior, and subtle character plans—a perfect match for SGM^® icons that help students recognize story structure and the “landscape of consciousness” (characters’ plans, mental states, and feelings).

Oh, No! and Oh, No! Not Again!

Collaborating with illustrator Dan Santant, these books feature exciting plots and minimal text, providing numerous opportunities to scaffold the process of making meaning. Stories of an academically driven girl whose sometimes-irresponsible dabblings in science lead to disastrous consequences, the books play with sequence in a manner that keeps students bridging narrative gaps.

I recently used this book to explore situational awareness with a student, using Ward/Jacobsen’s model of Space, Time, Objects, People (STOP) to analyze school science fairs—this could be aligned with the use of an Expository Setting or Sequence Map.

We love a sequel or series! The illustration above, near the beginning of Oh No! Not Again!, tells a rich story without many words, but is ripe for analysis with icons/elements (such as the kick-off), the use of multiple character perspectives, and feeling, mental states, and plan.

• What is the kick-off for the girl? Having one point taken off for not knowing the country that has the oldest prehistoric cave drawings.
• What was her reaction? To complain to the teacher (this plan, when it does not work, drives the rest of the silly story).
• What are the kids in front of her, who were not nearly as successful on this test, thinking about her? Jeez, get over it!

Sam and Dave Dig a Hole (illustrated again by Jon Klassen)

On its surface, this book is about two kids digging for treasure. But under the surface (literally!), it explores persistence, changing plans, and differing perceptions and perspectives.

Over many twists and turns in their journey downward to find something of value, kids I have worked with have enjoyed observing Sam and Dave’s focus, sadly never moving to their dog’s cues to “dig here!” Again, while an entertaining and mappable Complete Episode, the elements of thinking abound here, and will be a hook for your Minecrafters.

I am looking forward to Barnett’s next series, the Now I See books about the four seasons (also with Klassen). Time periods are always a great executive function-building topic to explore!

As the holiday season is upon us, I was thinking about the variety of cultural and religious (or both) observations that take place around this time, and how they tie into the observation of the winter solstice. For me, this astronomical event takes prominence as I wallow in Boston with Seasonal Affective Disorder during these short days, it marks a kind of “cosmic hump day” where the days start to get longer.

I wanted to produce a resource of text linked to elements of SGM^® that we could use as a guide to “mapping” these intercultural observances with our students this year and beyond. Included below are infographics of a sort, with text explanations of the solstice, Christmas (religious tradition), Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.

Suggested applications and extensions of these lessons:

• Use these contexts with the SGM^® Maps, Magnet Sets, or Digital Icons.
• Take these models and produce the more “secular” story of Christmas.
• Watch and map any holiday-related book or TV “special.”
• Copy the text into ChatGPT and ask it for images that will support your story mapping lessons.

Have a wonderful holiday season and Happy New Year!

Recent discourse around gratitude has created the term “glimmers,” serving as the opposite of “triggers.” Glimmers are small observations that help calm our nervous systems.

Some months ago, I ran across a post from the comedian Gary Gulman, who has written frequently about recovering from depression. In the post, he showed how he uses his Notes app on iPhone to create a simple gratitude journal, stemming from simple, but valuable observations about each day. I started this as a habit myself! ⇨

Whatever our role in supporting learners, to some extent we also own the support of their self-regulation. So how can we foster gratitude as a tool? Thanksgiving is a good starting point, but I also like to revisit this practice throughout the year, because, as noted, it’s the regular training of our brains in this habit that makes a difference.

I was thinking about gratitude in the context of Story Grammar Marker® and recognized that a moment of gratitude is “a little” story, in the sense that it might be connected to any of the key story elements. We might be grateful for a person (Character), a place we have visited or inhabit (Setting), a unique event (Kick-Off) or everyday event (Action). We might be grateful for a memory or way of thinking (Mental State), the way a problem or situation concluded (Tie-Up), or just how we have been feeling lately (Internal Response–Feeling).

Using these icons, I created a share-able, typable lesson resource:

You can obtain this lesson by visiting this link. Please do not request edit access, as this will not allow you to make the lesson your own. While signed into a Google account, from the File menu, select Make a Copy, and it’s yours!

This is a great template to use with a group, such that you can teach the connections to the pictured story elements and have everyone contribute a gratitude. Duplicate the slide if you have more than 4 students. Similarly, this can be used with individual students working 1-1, or as a template to share with them in Google Classroom. Consider changing the background color of the slide to work on gratitudes at other times of year.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

A thought balloon is a very valuable tool.

I’ve become enamored with Story Grammar Marker’s thought balloon icon, accessed among other ways through MindWing’s Digital Icons Set and The Critical Thinking Triangle in Action. Working with neurodiverse clients, this icon provides a key cue toward using mental state verbs and adeptness with reading others’ thoughts and intents that can translate (or be used directly for) real-life situations. It’s also easy to add a digital thought balloon to any visual support, which I have written about here in the past.

The thought bubble came to mind (heh!) when assisting a graduate student this week as she planned her Halloween-themed session. On Epic! Books for Kids—don’t miss, free for educators—she chose “The Halloween Costume Contest,” a simply structured, fun book that can be analyzed at Action Sequence and above. When reviewing the book, I immediately noticed the role of the thought balloon:

In the case of this book, the characters’ thought bubbles show them imagining possible costumes, a good direct link to executive functioning via Sarah Ward and Kristen Jacobsen’s concept of Future Thinking. This will be wonderful for my graduate student’s client because she has been practicing the Get Ready-Do-Done method of task execution during a weekly craft.

Below are a couple of other Halloween-themed books available that feature word or thought balloons. I often access picture books on YouTube and read them with the sound off and video paused, using the arrow keys to advance “pages.”

• “A Very Brave Witch” A young witch does not fear humans the way other witches do, and explores a nearby town, finding a friend!
• “Sir Simon, Super Scarer” Filled with word balloons, so much of this book provokes discussion of Simon’s thoughts as he endeavors to be the best professional ghost ever. A good opportunity to use the digital thought balloon technique linked above, or some post-its! Happy Halloween!

“In spontaneous interactions, you have to tell a story to get a story. Almost everyone has experienced awkward silences in social situations. No one can think of a thing to say. However, the minute one person launches into a tale about locking keys in his or her car or leaving lights on in a parking lot, virtually all others in the group share a similar incident that happened to them.”

This goes for kids, too, as they are often quite able at any age to shy away from situations that are “cringe!”

Presenting a story to our students, in addition to the likelihood of receiving a story in return, can also be a great way of discussing self-regulation strategies such as Zones of Regulation^® or scaffolding problem-solving. After all, problem-solving is a narrative process! In all of the above approaches, visual supports can aid in processing and responding to model narratives, which is where our photos come in handy. We must remind ourselves that the camera we have with us all the time can serve to capture narrative information.

Sometimes, however, we miss the shot. The other day I had a hilarious occurrence where a bird found its way into our living room while I was alone at home. I discovered this quite suddenly as I walked into the room and let out a loud, unmanly shriek. From the other end of the house, I realized that this problem was unlikely to solve itself, so I regulated myself, went in there and opened a window, whereupon it luckily flew right out.

I thought this would make a great story in therapy groups later that day, but figured a visual would certainly help. I wondered, “Can AI enhance a photo so I can tell this story?” It can.

I have had pretty good luck lately with Google Gemini for image creation, so thought I would start there. First, however, I needed a base photo, so I positioned my camera standing up, and in selfie mode. Cameras have timers, but I used my Apple Watch’s Camera Remote feature to get a posed photo. From Gemini, it is easy to start a chat—hit the plus + button and upload a photo.

I did this with my Just OK But Good Enough photo and began with this prompt:

I had to offer a few additional prompts to try to get the bird to face me (failure) and settled on asking Gemini to move it closer, ending up with the again Good Enough photo at right:

Now, to place this in Story Grammar Marker^® context, Google Slides and the MindWing digital icons did the trick.

My boys’ group had been working together to construct a treehouse in Minecraft EDU, so I thought I’d make the figurative connection that my house is like a treehouse, as we live on the 3rd floor (photo is a screenshot from Google Earth because I forgot to snap one before leaving home). This generated a lot of conversation from the get-go:

Shapes in Google are typable, and you can provide any type of text scaffolding to set up the activity, or just type as the kids talk! They love that. In this activity, I was surprised to note the scaffolding needed to help students draw conclusions as to why we would want the bird to exit safely (Plan), as opposed to swatting it, and the likely success of opening a window. So, a good problem-solving activity in their “zone!”

I hope you will check out Google Gemini’s image generation and modification features. Remember, you can also just make (picture) stories up!

For our third and final entry of this year’s Summer Study Series,

Sketch and Speak works like it sounds, scaffolding students’ use of pictography, or quick sketches, to visualize details of an expository passage, followed by their oral description. This process has terrific synergy with MindWing’s methodology and materials, particularly ThemeMaker, as structural comprehension approaches (i.e. ,analyzing List, Sequence, Description, Compare-Contrast, and other structures) go hand-in-hand with developing understanding of the expository content.

In fact, MindWing’s Expository Maps go so well with this strategy, they can literally be used as the space for it. Let’s look at how this would work with this article from NewsELA, which describes how dogs’ tail wagging could spring from humans’ enjoyment of that body language, rather than being a real sign of the dogs’ happiness. DocHub is a good place to put this into practice—besides print, pen and paper—as you can easily make a sketch on a PDF such as the digital MindWing Maps available through your manual:

Sketches show the sequence of researchers who wonder why wolves do not tail-wag, and the finding that humans liked the rhythm of tail wagging, then selected those dogs that exhibited it best to be their pets.

In brief, Sketch and Speak incorporates visualization lessons such as the following, then later proceed to more writing-based activities such as “bulleted notes” (again, the MindWing Maps would be a great space for bulleted notes and provide the structural focus):

• Read aloud text with print in view.
• Stop to identify an important or interesting idea.
• Turn the idea into a "quick and easy, just enough to remember" pictography note. This involves sketching iconic images that help students break away from the source text's words.
• Say a full sentence from the pictography.
• Say the full sentence again, revising it if needed for quality or accuracy.
• Repeat these steps for each text idea until the article is read and a number of pictographs are made.
• Say a full oral report from the pictographs.

If adding an additional “study” element to this post, I would recommend checking out a very recent article by Peterson and Ukrainetz, “Examining the Social Validity of Sketch and Speak Expository Intervention for Adolescent Students, Their Parents, and Their Speech-Language Pathologists” (2025). The title made me ask: “wait, what is social validity?” This term refers to the ways in which the goals, procedures, and outcomes of an intervention are relevant and socially important to the student receiving the intervention, and to other stakeholders (such as family, teachers, or caregivers).

 In this research note, three adolescents with LLDs received the intervention via telepractice (interesting). The students perceived potential independent use of the strategies in school activities and expressed confidence in their ability to use them, while parents reported improvements in their children's overall learning confidence and ability to understand and express information.

SLPs’ responses revealed three main themes: 1) strategy buy-in, 2) generalizability across curriculum, and 3) barriers to implementation (such as time, logistics, and potential lack of teacher buy-in). Overall, all three participant groups shared perceptions of increased student confidence and ownership of learned strategies, concluding that Sketch and Speak may be a socially valid and academically useful intervention for students, even when delivered remotely.

So, to conclude with a little technical support on some of the above, here are some steps you may follow:

1. Obtain Expository Map PDFs via the link in your manual, and upload to your Google Drive.
2. Open a PDF by clicking on it in Google Drive, and in the top center click Open With and select DocHub (or Connect more apps if you don’t see this option)
3. Allow permissions and then use the tools in the top menu to add text or sketches

As an alternate procedure, you can use MindWing’s Digital Icons with a lot of flexibility, adding icons, text and sketches to a digital whiteboard space such as those offered free through Miro.

Well, if you wanted a hot summer and wouldn’t take this one, I’m not sure what to offer you!

Speaking of, the American Speech‑Language‑Hearing Association (ASHA)’s CRISP Committee (Clinical Research, Implementation Science, and Evidence-Based Practice) has developed a series of nine modules on evidence‑based and best practices assessment, which would serve as a great self-guided study activity as we think about the fall!

The site, hosted on ASHA’s Teaching, Learning & Research (TLR) Hub, grabbed my eye since it relates to narrative as a critical aspect of any speech-language assessment, and in particular, MindWing’s tools for supporting these processes, including Story Grammar Marker®.

The modules are designed to support educators and clinicians with rigorous, research‑informed practices for speech, language, and hearing assessment. Each module includes a video presentation, downloadable slides, and an application activity. The modules cover concepts in evidence-based assessment, purposes and types of assessments, issues in validity and bias, and guidance in selecting assessment tools and making clinical decisions in the evaluation process.

Within the scope of this self-study resource, I was most interested in seeking its take on qualitative/criterion-referenced and dynamic assessment in narrative. In my roles as a private-practice-based evaluator and clinical instructor, I still frequently encounter written assessments that have ONLY included standardized assessments, which by nature neglect to fully characterize how the individuals perform when the structure of a standardized test is stripped away and they are asked to formulate or retell a story. Within the module on Types of Assessment, Trina Spencer provides a great overview, encompassing standardized, but also criterion-referenced and dynamic assessments, in their role in helping to design intervention and monitor progress (see MindWing’s great tools in this regard). When discussing static vs. dynamic assessments, Ms. Spencer emphasizes the way that dynamic assessment can more effectively capture and support differences in home, community, and learning environments, and thus be more soundly rooted in cultural, socioeconomic (and might I say also, neuro-) diversity.

Ms Spencer goes on to describe the critical element of a dynamic assessment, designed to measure learning potential, as including the teaching of a skill or strategy:

I’d like to encourage you to view this module and others in the series, but I’ll leave you with some placement of these key ideas in context of specific assessment activities, because applying Story Grammar Marker® to your evaluation can, of course,  be your source of explicit teaching of skill and strategy.

Consider the following dynamic activity possibilities:

• Elicit a verbal telling of one of the wordless books in the Frog, Where are You? Series (Mayer); provide a visual and verbal model with an SGM® story map, then repeat with a subsequent book in the series.
• Ask the student to view a Simon’s Cat video and tell the story to a teacher or peer (creating a naive listener condition that may result in more pragmatic elaboration). Then make sure “you’ve got the story right” by analyzing the story in a scaffolded activity using SGM®’s Magnet Set. Review the icons with the student in a later session and see how they apply them to a different Simon’s Cat video.
• Combine criterion-referenced and dynamic assessment by using the CUBED free narrative assessment. Many of the early grade level assessment activities start with a sample story, which could easily be used to break down and teach the narrative elements within, before completing the main retell activity with the student. I also feel like the expectation to include specific grade-level vocabulary words in the retell could be stated more explicitly to students, as my students have almost never included these words, and thus did not gain those score-able points.

I hope you are enjoying your summer as we segue into August!

This month we check out the first of a two-part article discussing game-based learning (GBL), a popular approach for engagement in classrooms. The article can be found at Getting Serious About Games: Exploring How Game-Based Learning Is Used in Education and Therapy. The piece has many points that relate to how games can be used as a language and learning context, an intersection we have also explored in our blog here in the past.

Some key points of the article are as follows:

• SLPs have a long history of using games to contextualize targets and motivate students. With game-like activities more frequently being used in the classroom, this provides an opportunity for teachers and SLPs to collaborate to design activities that meet the needs of our students.
• Specific to and broadening the definition of games, the article emphasizes that games “include both physical and digital games, inclusive of various design components. Gamification is the process of taking a learning experience and overlaying it with game features such as reward systems or plotlines.”
• This plotline piece is what grabs my attention with this article, as any context with a narrative or plot can be a great place to include Story Grammar Marker^® in the process for building student’s awareness of narrative structure, assist in comprehending the narrative, and scaffold problem solving and decision making where options are offered in the game (pretty much required for it to be called a game).
• Relevant suggestions for building a Game-Based Learning (GBL) experience for individuals with autism spectrum disorder included using a narrative to contextualize learning, non-linear plots with decision points, and games with an age-appropriate plot that naturally integrates target skills.
• I’ll again recommend the inexpensive games from Family Pastimes, which designs cooperative games that have simple plots we can map with SGM^® and often a social-cognitive focus on “following a group plan,” which is a great extension of SGM^®’s Plan icon.
• Aspects emphasized from data gathering of teacher and SLP perspectives included criteria for choosing or designing games: “high-interest low-complexity design features, current and appealing visuals or graphics, and short time frames for play,” and clear specificity toward learning goals, which could entail curriculum vocabulary/concepts or linguistic targets such as forming a complete and complex sentence to state a player “move” or choice in the game.

The article provides great food for thought.

Some specific resources I recommend that are relevant to infusing games in sessions, or more broadly in the classroom, include the following:

• Create a choose-your-own adventure story that serves as a “game.” ChatGPT does a great job of creating these for you, and over at Ditch that Textbook, they have a guide to helpful prompts you can use with AI, as well as a Google Slides template to make your story visual and interactive.
• Consider simplified role-playing games (RPGs) such as Hero Kids, or the very open-ended options, Movie Night or The Event (all very inexpensive). RPGs are great for getting students to use language to create characters, settings, and generate narratives about problems and solutions!
• Also take a look at the Escape Room genre: I love the lightly story-based resources at Virtual Escape Rooms and also those at Hooda Escape, and you can always infuse more context with related picture books!

 If Google’s Arts and Culture website can be taken as a model,

Sparky is a great one to start with. In this activity, you create inventions by combining everyday objects. Begin by choosing a purpose for the invention—food, music or travel—then allow your students to use their imaginations and collaborate. Following the combination of items (which is a great context for sentence building with cohesive ties), the invention is generated and described. The language and images provided would be a great topic for informational text mapping with ThemeMaker’s Descriptive or Sequence maps (to describe the steps for how the invention is used), or to create a story with Story Grammar Marker^® about the problem the invention solves. Maybe also pair this with a good old Schoolhouse Rock video Mother Necessity, or the invention-themed picture book UGH, by Arthur Yorinks, or a list of other idioms about inventing.

Among other possibilities to explore on the Arts & Culture website, Where is Hopper? will have you using a mock smartphone interface to follow clues to find Hopper the penguin across different locations and artworks inspired by real museum collections. This activity cries out for an exploration of setting, as I first tracked Hopper to Barcelona. Google Earth and/or Street View would be a great way to provide interesting visuals to students and have them complete a Descriptive Setting Map, along with tracking the story of your search with SGM^®.

Finally, take a look at The Descent of the Serpent. This one is good for your mid- to upper elementary or even middle school students who won’t be put off by the slightly creepy theme and vibe. Players are tasked with retrieving 20 sacred artifacts stolen by the deity Tezcatlipoca, representing symbols from the Aztec Sun Stone. The mission is to return them to Chichen Itza before the solar equinox to prevent catastrophic floods! Lighter, lower-stakes gameplay is offered in the Story mode, and this activity would be a great way to target expository text comprehension through the completion of a List Map describing your findings.

If you are looking for more specific information on the connections between video games and communication or storytelling, Dr. Erik Raj has a great session on this available through Bright Ideas Media.

Join us in celebrating this milestone, and let’s work together to bring language comprehension to the center of classroom literacy instruction! As speech-language pathologists, reading specialists, and teachers, we know that language comprehension is the foundation of all learning, thinking, and communication. 

What is the Language Comprehension Institute?
The Language Comprehension Institute is a research-affiliated implementation institute committed to transforming how language comprehension is understood, taught, and applied in today's educational settings. LCI's work is grounded in research and driven by a shared belief: that connecting listening, speaking, reading, writing, thinking, and learning into a cohesive instructional system is essential for every student’s success.

How was the Language Comprehension Institute founded?
In the wake of COVID19, as MindWing’s team worked alongside educators, we observed an increasing trend: students struggling with language comprehension and expressive language use in both academic and social settings. During our workshops, educators consistently asked for more modeling, tools, and professional learning focused specifically on language comprehension —and how to implement it effectively in their classrooms.

In response, MindWing's team collaborated with leaders in general education, curriculum, reading, and research to explore a critical question: 
What conditions must be in place for effective, integrated language comprehension instruction to take hold in classrooms and lead to improved student literacy outcomes?
The result of this collaboration was the founding of the Language Comprehension Institute (LCI). Learn more about what LCI does!

The Story Grammar Marker® (SGM®) Approach, along with MindWing's many effective implementation resources, provide a means for the explicit, systematic instruction that students need to develop comprehension, critical thinking, and expressive language. When embedded within LCI’s System, the SGM® Approach becomes more accessible and actionable than ever—empowering educators to make language comprehension visible and teachable.

Here is a SNEAK PEEK at the NEW COURSE designed by LCI! It is launching in collaboration with MindWing's team this June: Language Comprehension Instruction for Educators: A Missing Factor for Visible Student Literacy Outcomes.

Learn more about what the Language Comprehension Institute does, its dedicated founding members, and its esteemed Advisory Board at https://languagecomprehensioninstitute.org/.

I have often thought that although assessment materials—including SLAM (School Aged Language Assessment) cards offered by the Leaders Project—offer great baseline or progress monitoring tools, it would be great to have something similar for treatment. I have been continually impressed by the materials the graduate students I work with at Boston University create with Slides Go, so I wanted to tell you about this great resource!

Slides Go is designed to provide Google Slides or PowerPoint templates, generally to adults making presentations. Sounds boring, right? HOWEVER, the templates include adorable cartoon-like sets that are very appealing to young students. And, within each set are clickable, draggable, rotatable elements that can also be copied and pasted between slides to create stories. Naturally, given the workspace is Google Slides or PowerPoint, you can also add text or keep the story wordless.

Here’s a simple example: click here to see the whole slide set as edited in Google Slides.

I only made slight adjustments to these slides to create a simple Action Sequence, potentially a sequence to help students:

• describe the Setting
• describe Actions, along with verb phrases
• add potential elaborated noun phrases (e.g., “orange cat”)...
  all with the help of Braidy the Story Braid^® or Story Grammar Marker^®.

It’s easy to delete or modify text boxes, and for the 3rd image, seen above, I simply rotated one of the girl figures to put her in a position of catching the ball, and copy-pasted a girl from another slide.

The content in each Slides Go template is, of course, limited to a specific context, but you don’t need to be limited. A PNG is an image that is transparent, or lacks a background, so you can add your own story elements or events to your material. You can add a PNG within Google Slides: “Insert>Image>Search the Web” and use a term such as “PNG clip art thunderstorm” that I used to add the element below,

Look! Now we have a Kick-Off and the image can be used to prompt a Reaction Sequence narrative.

You can also create story elements with the available Slides/PowerPoint tools, e.g., shapes or arrows can be helpful to suggest other objects or movement, respectively.

So, some suggested steps in using Slides Go:

• Navigate to the website and sign in with a Google account. This will shuttle templates to your Google Slides. Note: there is a limit of 3 templates/month with the free account, so preview templates before choosing.
• Search Slides Go with terms such as “kids,” “children,” “elementary school” or contexts like “jungle,” “farm,” or “ocean” to find some fun, modifiable content.
• When you find a template you like, click Download this Template, and choose Google Slides or PowerPoint (or Canva, though I haven’t dabbled there much).
• Edit and customize with the suggested maneuvers above! Note that each Slides Go template contains a variety of layout slides, so you’ll do a lot of slide deletion too.

Have a great time with your story-making!

• Spontaneous and naturalistic
• Identifying functional areas of need
• Multi-dimensional for Macro- and Microstructure Assessment, treatment planning AND progress monitoring

Additionally, Meghan and Caroline described barriers to language sample analysis, including time investment and clinicians’ uncertainty and lack of confidence in their skills for this kind of assessment. Truly, the time factor was always a big deal. Recording, playing, and rewinding cassette tape recordings, as we typed out a sample, gave way to doing the same with digital recordings on our phones and iPads, saving little time. Speech-to-text tools such as Google Docs’ Voice Typing helped a bit with the pain of transcription, but it was still tedious.

With the recent arrival of easy-to-use artificial intelligence (AI), obtaining a transcription of a language sample is SO much easier! AI transcription utilizes Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology, which is based on language and learning models that interpret human speech and convert a recording into text. There are two good options available for this:

Rev.ai is a HIPAA-compliant site, should that be important to you, and allows for up to 5 hours of transcription (only two cents a minute after that allotment is used). Just go to the Speech-to-Text tab and submit your digitally recorded file as a “job” (a Voice Memos file works). After it processes you can download a TXT file which can be opened in a word processor.

Otter.ai allows for 3 uploaded recordings for free, but you can record live with the website or app and it will transcribe the “meeting,” also good for collecting language samples. Otter’s interface is a bit more user-friendly than Rev’s. Working in private practice, I like Rev’s HIPAA compliance just to be safe, even though it is unlikely that protected health information (PHI), such as client name or birthday, is protected in any of my recordings.

After obtaining the transcript, you’ll want to compare it with your recording to check for any errors in transcription, as AI may be tripped up by a variety of factors: background noise, overlapping speech, homophones, speech sound errors. And, it may or may not transcribe filler words or mazes (Rev.ai is better with this) that may be important to characterize how your student produces narrative. SALT provides a good guide to segmenting any sample into C units to view sentence complexity, and of course, MindWing has made available a variety of tools for analyzing language samples, including their Data Collection and Progress Monitoring manual.

I hope these tools provide you some ease and comfort for initial or ongoing assessment of your students’ narrative language!

Lately, I’ve been coming back to an oldie-but-goodie resource, Scribblenauts (“Remix” version available for iPad or iPhone for $.99 with tons of content, other options explored below). Scribblenauts is a puzzle game where players can type in upwards of 20,000 nouns, even with adjective modifiers, to bring in objects that help solve stated problems within the scene. As such, it provides an open-ended “sandbox” with a range of stories solvable with actions and elaborated noun phrases. I like to think of Scribblenauts as a series of mini-lessons, one of those 5-10-minute “rewards” for students that are actually language therapy activities.

Scribblenauts Remix comes with 17 “Worlds,” each with 10 levels (yes, that’s potentially 170 lessons). It’s a video game for non-gamers, perfect for use with our youngsters because most (not all) don’t have any required pace of response. This allows you plenty of time to step in to scaffold without interrupting the game.

Let’s analyze the first 5 levels for language opportunities! Note that you need not go into any scene blind—as in most games, the levels are documented here.

Level 1-1: Cut down the tree: The forest scene is ripe for description with the Setting icon of Story Grammar Marker^®, along with Kick-Off/Action or simply Action.

Level 1-2: Give two of them what they need in their hands: Community helpers lead you to Character, Setting, Action, and scaffolding of an object.

Level 1-3: Prepare the schoolhouse for a new year: Perfect for a Setting description activity!

Level 1-4: Pit stop! Give the car replacement parts to get it back on track! Take a detour to discuss car racing settings, and the category of car parts. You’re on the road to problem-solution.

Level 1-5 Kick Off the Beach Party! Scaffold adding a list of items that go with the Setting/Situation of a beach party (lots of things would work: food, music, sports equipment).

As you proceed, you’ll see so many options for language-enhancing interactions.

1. Create a Story Around the Solution. Maybe a farmer’s cow is stuck in a tree (Yes, things get weird in Scribblenauts). Ask your student for a solution, but with a "why" and "how" behind their choices.
• “I’m going to summon a ladder because the farmer can climb it to reach the cow.”
• “Then I’ll use a rope to pull the cow down safely.”
2. Retell the Puzzle. After completing a puzzle, scaffold your students with SGM in retelling the story. For instance:
• “The kick-off was the cow got stuck in the tree, so I gave the farmer a ladder. The cow climbed down safely.”
3. Predict What Happens Next Once. the puzzle is solved, ask the child to imagine what happens after the screen fades.
• “Now that the cow is safe, what do you think the farmer will do?” These imaginative extensions are great for developing ‘future thinking’ and creative storytelling.
4. **Brainstorm Multiple Solutions** Ask your students to come up with different ways to solve the same problem and evaluate which solution might be best. Working on this in a group fosters collaboration in play.
• For the cow-in-a-tree scenario, one solution might involve summoning a trampoline, another a helicopter, and another a lumberjack.

You can also get a taste of Scribblenauts on the web, or via the Steam game browser. Have fun and solve some problems! Keep in mind that you will never need to fly blind—look up a “walkthrough” for any level (of any game, for that matter).

On a related note, if you haven’t yet watched Erik Raj’s wonderful presentation on using video games in therapy, you can do so for free until January 31 via the SLP Summit.

Wicked has become an almost-too-inescapable cultural juggernaut

It so happens that one of the catchy set pieces, “What is this Feeling?” is available from the production in full on YouTube. As Elphaba says later, “think of what we could do, together…” There’s just so much that you can do with this clip.

• First learning Story Grammar Marker^® way back when, I recall Maryellen Moreau demonstrating how to analyze “The Wizard of Oz” as a whole story (pie) or an episode (slice) such as Dorothy’s crash-down in Munchkinland. Similarly, “What is this Feeling?” can be mapped pinning Elphaba and Galinda’s being paired as roommates as the Kick-Off, along with story elements such as Galinda’s jealousy of Elphaba’s private instruction with Madame Morrible (one possible resolution of this episode). The events of this clip also would lend themselves to a recap with a Perspective Taking Map or multiple Critical Thinking Triangles, for sure, to consider both sides of this story. Or add the student body for a 3rd perspective!
• Why be so on-the nose? You can look at the macro of the whole story in a same-but-different way via this hilarious animated recap with many story events implied, or with even more silliness through this Peppa Pig overlay of the trailer.
• Let’s rewind to a pre-video activity. My students benefitted from a discussion of the setting of college, scaffolded well with the Setting Map to discuss examples, setting parts and their uses/functions, and comparison to other settings such as High School.
• Think Sequence! What is this Feeling has become somewhat of a TikTok phenomenon with many people imitating its dance sequences. Maybe you and your students can become the next viral sensations, or at least learn a few of the moves in order.
• There’s so much micro here too, with the opportunity to explore vocabulary such as unadulterated loathing, related feelings words, or the physical sensations associated with different emotions—a great lesson(s) in self-regulation!

Hope your Holiday season Defies Gravity!

From twinkling lights and festive decor to excited students counting down the days, there's an undeniable energy that fills the classroom this time of year. As teachers, SLPs, specialists, and parents, though, the holidays often come with “double dip” feelings of—joy and stress, combined with the hustle of balancing lessons, holiday events, and end-of-year tasks. Amidst it all, it’s easy to feel like you’re racing against the clock. But what if you could slow things down just enough to create meaningful holiday-themed learning experiences? Here, we have linked some of our most popular holiday-themed lessons and posts using Story Grammar Marker^®, Braidy^® The StoryBraid, ThemeMaker^®, and Talk to Write, Write to Learn^®:

Embrace the Holiday Spirit Without Losing the Learning

Holiday-themed lessons don’t have to mean pushing aside academic goals. In fact, they can add relevance, excitement, and connection to your curriculum. For Oral Language Development, Reading Comprehension and Expression using Story Grammar Marker^® or Braidy^®, you may read seasonal books, poems, or short stories, or use Talk to Write, Write to Learn^® and ask students to write letters, creative narratives, or persuasive essays about their favorite holiday traditions.

In Science, you may use ThemeMaker^® informational text structures and explore winter weather, light and shadows, or the science of baking holiday treats. Also using ThemeMaker^® for Social Studies, you may discuss how holidays are celebrated around the world, bringing in cultural traditions, symbols, and their histories.

The holidays can be both joyful and challenging for students. Use this time to foster kindness, gratitude, and reflection to embed Social Emotional Learning into your lessons using the Critical Thinking Triangle^® and Making Connections (Autism Collection Vol. 2).

Holiday lessons offer a wonderful opportunity to explore traditions, diversity, and inclusion, as well. Not all students celebrate the same holidays, and some may not celebrate at all, but it is always a great opportunity to learn about each other and about the world. These activities align with Common Core Standards and district initiatives, but add a festive twist that keeps students motivated to learn!

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Take a Breath and Enjoy the Moments

While the holiday season is often a whirlwind, some of your most meaningful teaching moments can come during these weeks when you pause, connect, and make learning magical. Whether it’s a simple holiday read-aloud, a craft project, or a science experiment with a seasonal twist, these lessons remind us of the joy and warmth that learning can bring.

Happy holidays, and happy teaching from your friends at MindWing!

It turns out that there are a number of AI story generation tools, and you can use ChatGPT for text creation, but for this post I explored Perchance. This website offers a general story creation tool but others, including a character builder and bedtime story creator which reads to you and adds music! All of these are notably free, and also generate images of characters or story actions.

From my experience with AI, I am learning that this can be somewhat of a trial and error, and/or dialogic process with the tools, so today I want to present some steps I took to achieve a desired, usable result.

I started with a simple prompt about Thanksgiving, with an eye towards encouraging my students to take a role in helping at home. Here I included some story structure which the AI did not quite implement accurately.

Hmm, a reasonable start, but here we see a Kick-Off/Plan and not the Actions or Conclusion. It’s also rather “Hallmark Channel” and makes me want to brush my teeth due to its over-sweetness. But, I can easily do some quick edits to the result. I would recommend cutting/pasting/editing text and images from an AI into a simple format like a Word document or Google Docs/Slides.

I went on to ask the AI to “add 3 actions Timmy does to help” and it came up with some great ones, such as cleaning his room and making turkey-themed place cards.

You can also click “regen” and it will come up with something slightly different that you may like better. As mentioned, just cut and paste your text to another format, and secondary/right click to copy or save any images.

Overall, with short work, I had a usable story that was certainly easier than writing one myself! Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving and find year-round uses for this handy tool.

Check out the resulting song!

Not bad, right? You can sign into Suno with a Google, Apple or other account, and though the number of songs you can create is based on a credit system, it is available as a relatively free service, for now.

Let’s consider the kind of prompt you can give to Suno. It first of all helps to consider genre; I wrote children’s song but you can specify pop, rock, dance, or other (I had a student who wanted to create a Celtic song, and it obliged). What else can go in the description? Story elements! I kept this example minimal and related to a Character/Kick-Off, but using Story Grammar Marker^® to scaffold from your creators/students, you can certainly specify settings, feelings, and actions or conclusions. Note there is also a “Custom” switch where you can be more specific and write lyrics or lyric parts.

That said, without guidance the AI pretty much generated those narrative elements, and in a poetic fashion, amazingly. Note that the lyrics can be viewed on the right side or when you click through to view the full song page, providing a good literacy building opportunity. Let’s take a quick look at the story in the song:

I have yet to find a child or teen who is not on some level delighted by this tool. It’s certainly fun, but also allows key storytelling features that can allow you to scaffold skills that can be used in other areas. Though this is a Halloween post, I hope you will consider Suno a tool you can use in many contexts to tell many stories!

With the school year back in full swing,

I recently used Google Earth with some second-graders who had never seen it and they were amazed! Our lessons started as a context for exploring Ward/Jacobsen’s STOP strategy for situational awareness, which encourages students to think about Space, Time, Objects and People of a location or situation. A helpful connection is Social Thinking^®’s concept of the social detective observing at the cue of a doorway to a transitional space. In our group, we navigated to a local public library, used Street View, and made predictions about about the Space, Time, Objects and People of the setting (of course, using the Story Grammar Marker^® Setting icon, and actions within the setting corresponding to the Time aspect of the mnemonic).

Looking at a public location from above will generally give you the opportunity to review pictures of inside the space as well, enhancing the visual support for the activity.

Like the mouse with the cookie, if you give your students Google Earth, they will want to look at their own house. Visiting your and your students’ houses offers all kinds of expository and narrative opportunities. For example, the kids were confused about when the images were taken and why there might be differences from what it looks like at their homes now. This led to some expository cueing:

You can model and then elicit some personal narratives given the home scene you view. This one relates to the busy street I live on:

I hope you have a fun time taking virtual field trips and telling stories!

Teresa Ukrainetz has always been one of my go-to experts on a number of aspects of discourse, and is someone I fanboy about when I see her at ASHA Conventions. She also literally wrote the book on Contextualized Language Intervention, which is a foundational concept in helping me achieve flow in my work—both a flow of activities in context and the positive psychological sense of flow.

Some key points:

• TIL (Today I Learned, in Gen Z parlance) narrative versus expository language can be thought of as “particularizing vs generalizing” in nature. Narrative tends to describe an instance or event that happens to a particular person/character, where “expository forms take a generalizing stance to the information they transmit (e.g., how a combination of ingredients and heat causes a cake to rise).”
• Ukrainetz affirms the 6 subgenres that are generally considered to be pieces of the “pie” of expository language (description, enumeration/list, sequence or procedure, compare–contrast, and explanations involving problem–solution or cause–effect) and also considers persuasion and argument, all supported by visuals in MindWing’s ThemeMaker, Icons and Magnets, Digital Icons, and subsequent resources.
• The article explores a number of considerations including increasing expectations of expository language competence as the academic years progress, differences in syntax and semantics in expository text in general and within content areas specifically (disciplinary literacy) and the importance of supporting expository skills in early grades.
• Although she describes this area as difficult to research, Ukrainetz focuses on the evidence-based support for interventions that will be familiar and confirmatory for everyone reading this blog, in particular a focus on text structure and organization. The studies cited here also underscore the important role of graphic organizers in helping students gain skills in comprehending and producing expository texts, again supporting the resources linked above!
• Text structures are also wrapped into an additional area for which we have evidence, learning strategies. Ukrainetz describes a number of strategies endorsed by the National Reading Panel as having a “strong scientific basis”: “comprehension monitoring (readers being aware of their own understanding of the text), question generation (readers asking themselves questions about the text), and summarization (readers integrating ideas from the text).”
• Ukrainetz concludes with a plethora of helpful specifics for SLPs and others tackling this area of intervention, including effective “structural and interactive” features of instruction (how you organize/how you pragmatically implement your activities) and her own Sketch and Speak strategy, which to me Just Makes Sense.

Example of Sketch and Speak strategy with “pictography” of descriptive aspects of an axolotl.

As a tech tie-in for this month, explore ChatGPT to support you in creating materials for intervention. You can ask ChatGPT to write you any kind of expository paragraph, on any topic. You can further query the tool to increase or decrease the complexity of the language, and of course copy and paste to edit the resulting text to suit your needs.

To offer a simplification, the neurodiversity movement has emerged in recent years as autistic individuals aged toward adulthood. Social media in particular has given autistic culture an amplified voice, and this population has expressed opinions about their educational experiences and what has been helpful, and in some cases, harmful to them. Naturally, with the pandemic intensifying the messages of marginalized communities, the need for philosophical shifts in all educational disciplines has been intensified.

This month we are recommending A Primer on Neurodiversity-Affirming Speech and Language Services for Autistic Individuals (Gaddy & Crow, 2023).

Some key points:

• As specified in the title, the article is a helpful primer on NEUODIVERSITY and many associated concepts, including the definition of the term: “the idea that neurological differences are a natural and valuable part of human diversity, akin to differences in race, gender, and sexual orientation.”
• The authors provide helpful history on the movement as well as a consideration of the medical vs. social model of disability, including the shift toward disabled individuals as needing support, not repair.
• Though not specifically detailed through the article, we can immediately consider narrative language as a broad context through which autistic individuals can receive support, affirmation, and encouragement of sharing their perspectives, rather than an area of remediation.
• We should link the idea of neurodiversity-affirming care or intervention to client-centered care, an essential element of evidence-based practice (EBP). The piece describes “acknowledging [clients] as an expert on their own experiences,” which again points to the potential use of narrative tools such as Story Grammar Marker^® to help us ensure we are understanding these perspectives as we proceed.
• The article describes the key concept of the DOUBLE EMPATHY PROBLEM, or consideration that “it is not that autistic people lack empathy, it is the idea that empathy is bidirectional. Autistic and non-autistic people have difficulty cognitively and emotionally empathizing with each other in ways that the other understands.” I hope you see the value of MindWing’s Perspective Taking Map and other visuals as much as I do here, both in explaining this concept to clients (in my experience, many of mine have not heard of it) to support their self-advocacy, and in problem solving of everyday situations.
• A key section of the article details neuro-affirming language, which again involves a number of shifts such as avoiding functioning levels such as “low functioning” which stigmatize autistic individuals.

• Notably, the authors point to dynamic assessment of narrative as an essential element of neurodiversity-affirming evaluation, with the recommendation of using the free resources from Columbia University’s Leader’s Project previously recommended on this blog.
• The article concludes with a number of case studies, one of which describes a communication breakdown for which the Story Grammar Marker^® would be directly applicable to helping the child self-advocate and take steps to solve the problem.

Universal Magnet SetHere’s a quick thought to conclude and apply these concepts in sync with MindWing’s tools. One of the ways I have tried to be more neurodiversity-affirming in my work is with more consistent use of the Universal Magnet Set. The story icons broken free from the braid itself help me more freely, flexibly, and affirmatively represent stories my clients share, while also offering the opportunity to support them in elaborating and adding complexity.

For more information on this topic, check out the Therapist Neurodiversity Collective.

So, for details on this study (Doernberg, Russ, Dimitropoulos, 2020):

• The authors begin by detailing differences among autistic people in terms of pretend play and emotional understanding. A key point for me was the discussion of imagination: “Notably, the use of imagination and role-playing in pretend play may allow for a child to cognitively take on the perspectives of others, which may be further related to understanding the emotional experiences of others.” Let’s take that a step further—connecting with others through imagination is: a) FUN, and b) socially beneficial and facilitative of peer connections. This is a shift in my presentation of activities to my students—rather than “you need to do this,” “what you are doing is great and I dig it, AND this other thing may also benefit you.”
• The study implemented a play-based intervention with 25 students diagnosed with ASD (INV group), compared to a “waiting list control group” (WC). Measures such as an “Affect in Play” scale using puppets served as pre- and post-treatment measures, followed by a relatively small intervention period with a dosage of (5) 20-minute sessions.
• The intervention was based on an existing protocol from Russ and Moore and focused on “facilitating improvements in imagination in storytelling, organization of the story, and frequency and variety of emotion expressed in play, all via prompted play techniques…modeling, scaffolding, praising, reflecting emotions, and following the child’s lead.” I could not find the full protocol, as the author (also an author on this study) indicated it had been submitted for publication, but apparently not yet published.
• Intervention sessions involved “unstructured” toys such as blocks, Legos, toy cars, small dolls, etc., used with an introduction (more on this below, script the researchers used) and prompts such as “What is happening? What will happen first? What happens next?” “Show me. Use this to be pretend/make-up. Make up a different ending.”
• Loosely describing the results, the study found significant improvements in the INV group in “imaginative” moves in play and, notably for narrative language, organization markers such as sequencing and cause-effect. The study did not find a significant increase in “the frequency and range of affect expressed in play,” referencing emotional processing.

For practical applications of this study, I see it pointing to the power of narrative scaffolding in play. I particularly like to introduce students to the Story Grammar Marker^® icons and then have the uber-portable and flexible magnets from the Universal Magnet Set available, as they seem to fit right in with any set of toys. In addition, they can be used in any order, or in isolation to refer to and reinforce a specific story element.

While naturally directive and standardized because this was a study, let’s take a look at the script the researchers used:

“I have some toys for you to play with. I want you to make up stories about different things. So, you can make up a story and play it out with the toys. I will tell you when we are going to switch stories! Have the dolls and animals talk out loud so that I can hear. I will play with you. I want you to make up a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Think about what will happen next in the story. Use your imagination and make up new things.”

With a couple of tweaks, this can work for a more neurodiversity-affirming intervention:

“We are going to play with _______.  We can make up stories about different things! Here, I am using my imagination and will go first!”

This can be followed by omitting all that extra language and demands and modeling a story with the toys provided, using the magnets or other SGM visual support, to indicate some of the elements of the story acted out. It should be noted that we can also use story/expository icons to reinforce more repetitive elements of autistic play, for example, lining up cars to represent a LIST of cars.

In addition to your flexible toys, I often recommend the wonderful Toca Life: World app, which can be used to play out stories with simple to more complex structures.

Welcome to 2024’s Summer Study Series!

I have often reflected that MindWing’s approaches have equipped me with invaluable tools when working with younger populations, but also older clients. While still focused on pediatrics, I often have an adult or two on my caseload who presents with language comprehension or expression difficulties. Having learned extensively about macrostructure from Story Grammar Marker^® and ThemeMaker^®, I find that these tools translate well, with a little adaptation.

For example, I have had several adult clients recently who were seeking assistance with job interviews. In looking at sample job questions for their targeted field, I noted how many of the The job-hunting site questions were designed to prompt a narrative, list, sequence, description or cause-effect explanation. Indeed is often a great resource for this kind of preparatory material, as indicated by the linked list of questions.

This leads me to this month’s article, available to ASHA members or via your college library from Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, entitled “Implementing a Metalinguistic Approach to Secondary School Writing” (Telesca, 2023). Some key points:

• The article notes that with the rise of technology, writing has become a key vocational AND SOCIAL means of communication for young adults, and the skills of composing posts or emails (I worked on that with an adult client recently) are critical.

A quick glance at my Facebook memories shows how many posts I shared were stories or lists. For a resource less designed for the olds, look at TikTok and consider the structure(s) of what you see shared there.

• The article provides detail on the expectations of secondary school students (applying also to post-secondary and adult life) in terms of Common Core standards and those associated with The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP) in reading and writing, in the latter case much less developed in the sense of data on performance.
• A key point on the connection to narrative and expository text structures is a description of different types of writing a high school student might be asked to do in one day of school: a lab report, summary, and persuasive essay.
• The article describes evidence-based approaches including Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) which contains components for organization which jibe completely with the use of expository text structures such as those provided in ThemeMaker^®.
• Organizational and instructional strategies are detailed in the article, and this quote reminded me squarely of the guidance of Key Words/Cohesive Ties on the ThemeMaker^® Information Maps: “Knowledge of language form (i.e., sentence types, sentence word order, transition or signal words) must also be used to organize the generated ideas into sentence-level discourse.”
• Most helpfully, the article presents specific prompts at different levels of scaffolding to help other students progress with writing tasks (applying also to oral language tasks like responding to an interview question or planning a presentation), in the areas of “Planning, Translating and Reviewing.”

I hope you’ll read this article and, as I did, come away with new strategies and reinforcement that what you have learned with the use of MindWing’s tools is really translatable to all ages!

Escape rooms are popular diversions in real life and are inherently story-based through their varied themes. These experiences wrap language and visual cues into fun problem-solving situations, but can be pretty difficult to simulate in educational and intervention situations. Digital formats make this much easier!

Check out Hooda Math’s huge variety of free escape games—my favorite selections are the US State and National Park collections. These are always a hit with students and, though on their surface seem simple point-and-click games, offer a lot in terms of general language and tie-ins with expository text.

The Utah adventure challenges you to find a raft to “escape” the situation. Each game involves a series of scenes where you need to spy clickable elements, such as items to pick up or examine more closely, at times leading to sequencing puzzles. I have used these to encourage students to take notes, which offer opportunities for tie-ins with using MindWing’s expository icons and maps for List and Sequence.

The puzzles may seem complicated at first, but students, especially those working together, often have a natural sense of what to do next. There is also a “walkthrough” video for each game which provides a great brief overview of all the solutions, so this would arm you with an idea of how to give clues.

I have frequently used digital escape rooms in social groups as a way to facilitate students collaborating, “thinking with their eyes” and making inferences, and having fun. One of my favorite recent situations has been a student with expository language goals who attends sessions at BU’s clinic, working with a graduate student under my supervision. The student endured a long public transportation ride into Boston with his mother each week and, based on his request, we recently switched to a hybrid model, offering telepractice sessions every other week. Thus, we needed to think about visual engagement tools that could be used over Zoom. Hooda Escape games provided one avenue, and we have paired these with expository materials previewing and expanding on the setting of the chosen game. I am always quick to show my graduate students the offerings on Epic Books for Kids, which in particular has great photo books on every state in the USA! Epic has a longstanding great deal offering free accounts to educators.

The graduate student clinician guided the student through reading the book and completing an Expository Description Map before engaging with the escape room, which was a great motivator.

For more on using escape rooms in educational situations, check out this great resource from Edutopia.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is, of course, one of the hottest topics in technology these days. Its recently emerging abilities are producing a mix of excitement and anxiety for the ways that it is disrupting education and other fields, but like many technology developments, it should be viewed as a tool. You may not know where to start, but one path is using ChatGPT’s free tools along with prompts that can help you plan narrative language interventions.

What is ChatGPT?

It is a chatbot from OpenAI (owned by Microsoft) using generative AI, which is a form of artificial intelligence that can create text, images, video and other media. ChatGPT uses natural language to generate specific contextual results and is thus different from a Google search, which will return pages created by web developers. ChatGPT responds to prompts from you as a user, e.g., a question or request, and will continue to respond if you ask for additional information or wish to modify the results returned. You can access ChatGPT for free here; sign in with your Google ID and it will save your results when wish to return to them.

Following are some simple prompts to get started with ChatGPT.

Ask for a list of books to use for narrative teaching. When thinking about books that you can use with Story Grammar Marker^®, you may be interested in starting with the setting, character, or problems or themes that your students face. ChatGPT will return results, provide more if asked, or tailor its lists if you ask for something more specific (e.g. books from the last 5 years to target novel stories and engagement). I often take these results and then search Google for “[Title/author] e-book,” which can help me figure out where I might access the book: EPIC! (available free for educators), Hoopla (sign-in with your public library credentials), or my public library itself (via Overdrive/Libby e-book or placing a hold for the physical book).

Prompt with a specific story element. You may be interested in creating a story for your students, or co-creating one with a resource such as Book Creator. ChatGPT helps me scaffold my own creative powers in this manner by generating ideas. Not everything that it returns is great, that’s why we remain the better critical thinkers! Notice that ChatGPT does elaborate on each setting in response to this prompt which may help you think of story directions prompted by the aspects of the setting, or possible Kick-Offs.

Generate Kick-Offs from Real Life to Scaffold Problem Solving with SGM^®. Again, getting through your day as an educator takes enormous energy. You can support your own imagination and decision-making about contexts you might use with the resources provided by ChatGPT. Do you have students who struggle with the unstructured time on the playground? Consider previewing and building problem solving abilities with a prompt like this:

From these results, the therapy activity comes from copying and pasting/editing a result into a kid-friendly form, as I did here below with Google Slides:

You can then use your Digital Icons to help students see the connections between possible actions and consequences, again, below in Google Slides:

As you can see, with ChatGPT it’s all about the prompt. I hope you will try these and others to get your ideas flowing! Interested in more? You can search (Google) for resources on prompts for speech and language therapy and other disciplines.

Looking for narrative structure in varied places will yield you many TOOLs! This includes sources such as games, current events, interactive websites, and of course, videos. In this post I want to expand upon the great work of Dr. Anna Vagin, who several years ago co-presented a webinar with Maryellen Moreau on the power of using animations for social and language learning (Play..Pause...SGM, still available for free here).

A quote from this webinar resonates strongly: Jerome Bruner (1986, 1996) referred to narrative thinking as a capacity to “read other minds”; “to make accurate inferences about the motives and intentions of others based on their observable behavior and the social situations in which they act. Narrative thinking is the very process we use to understand the social life around us,” take perspective and to construct situation models.

These teaching points apply to a series that Dr. Vagin has since championed, that of Maca and Roni, two lab “helpers” who often experience multiple kick-offs per video episode, the playlist to be found here. Dr. Vagin has also created a Super Social Learning Spreadsheet in which she details many categories of social concepts which can be targeted using the videos, with links.

Recently, I have been using the Maca and Roni series in several different therapy contexts:

• With a high school student, we use the videos along with Story Grammar Marker^® with lots of pausing to interpret body language, emotions, plans and other mental states, as well as the connections between physical actions of the characters and consequences they experience.
• Using Fry Gun, this student benefited from scaffolding to interpret that Maca and Roni’s plans changed. Initially, they wanted to ingest every fried food they could find, but then craved vegetables after a fry gun turned everything into a fried treat.
• From Jenga, we explored the more complex feeling word of competitive (linkable in the 6 Universal Feelings to angry) and used screenshots to analyze the body language that signaled this emotion.

• Maca and Roni also provide great opportunities to build situational schema around unfamiliar topics—for this student, social media was unfamiliar and we explored how people use it to share their stories in posts or tweets (maybe Xs now?), below from Dr. Albert’s Birthday:

• These stories also provide excellent contexts for scaffolding language about mental states and perspectives using the Critical Thinking Triangle^®, this example from the clip Bon Voyage:

• Currently I have recommended these engaging and hilarious videos to a graduate student working with a first-grade client as a “clinical routine” to hone the students’ world schema and narrative interpretation, while she, as a clinician, is taking off with specific narrative teaching strategies.

I hope your “lab” is free of Maca-and-Roni-style, generally avoidable kick-offs this week!

This month’s tool is completely FREE, before I go any further!

I have been serving an adjunct role at Boston University for 5 semesters providing supervision to graduate students in their first clinical experiences in the in-house clinic. One of the routines for the semester is to teach and use processes for obtaining baseline and post-treatment data. It was by equipping students in this manner that I discovered the availability of the CUBED, along with the previously mentioned SLAM Cards. The CUBED is a “family of screening and progress monitoring tools” that includes a huge package of graded story samples (levels K-8) with narrative language listening and reading materials and measures.

The product is generously available from Language Dynamics Group, and aligns with their StoryChamps^® product, but also is very useful for progress monitoring with the use of Story Grammar Marker^® (which is how we have been using it at BU). All three clients I supervise have goals in narrative language, so this material has been exceedingly helpful for quickly equipping my graduate students in speech-language pathology with a tool they can use in their very first session. Keep in mind, this is before some of them even have a firm grasp of what narrative language is.

The leveled passages in the CUBED are currently K-3 for stories read to the student (listening), with upper grades “coming soon,” and K-6 for the student to read, including fluency and decoding measures. I have found it valuable to use the available grade 3 passages even with older students, as I am doing the process in a criterion-referenced manner (though some norms are available for the earlier edition), measuring against the bar that say, a 6th grade student should include all the expected 3rd grade elements.

The listening tasks include, among other elements:

• an engaging short story passage
• a grid to analyze the story elements the student includes in their retelling
• comprehension questions
• analysis of conjunctions/cohesive ties used (e.g., because/so, when/while)
• prompts putting a number of vocabulary words in context and asking for definitions, particularly helpful as the students we work with also have vocabulary goals
• a prompt for the student to generate a “same but different” personal narrative

I especially appreciate the personal narrative element, as this checks an additional box, allowing us to obtain a sample in this area (often after cajoling) without my needing to teach the graduate students an additional procedure. I have found that following the use of the CUBED, they have a more solid basis for being able to implement Story Grammar Marker^® as we proceed with therapy the following weeks.

Having described this useful tool in the context of supervising in a university clinic, I can say it has also been very useful to me as a clinician. I recently completed it in the space of 10 minutes with a student, an analysis in an additional 10 min, and had good data to present for a progress report. Overall, the CUBED could also be considered to provide a sample that is a simple base context (the provided stories and embedded vocabulary) to use along with MindWing’s Progress Monitoring Process.

My annotated PDF grid for this student’s performance, noting good developments in personal narrative!

You have probably heard chatter about the potential and possible pitfalls of AI in educational contexts. This month: a simple way to harness the possibilities of AI image generation.

Generative AI has been around for many years but has only been recently been made widely available to the public via a variety of webtools. This kind of artificial intelligence is called “generative” for its ability to use growing neural networks to create content, such as novel text, imagery or even music and video. ChatGPT is a recent tool which responds to prompts to create text, and I recently blogged about its usefulness in generating problem solving scenarios–also useful for targeting story elements.

Along with ChatGPT, Microsoft’s OpenAI offers DALL-E, an image generator which is able to create pictures from “natural language,” as opposed to code. This is most easily accessed through the Bing Image Creator, a simple tool that develops images from scratch (not search)!

Check out this image below, generated with the prompt “A farm with a cow and pigs. The cow is refusing to be milked by the farmer:”

Image Created in Bing Image Creator

Note the lesson possibilities here, as what you have is perfect alignment with Story Grammar Marker^®: Characters, Setting, and Kick-Off, with inherent Feelings and the opportunity to discuss Mental States and Actions or other story elements.

A prompt to Bing Image Creator generally gives you 4 results, so you (or your students) can decide which one best depicts your story. You can also cater your image to a certain style of art, such as anime, clip art, or line drawings.

Bing Image Creator Offers You Up to Four Images

This style could then become a great coloring, as well as a story analysis activity! As you can see, the story options are virtually limitless with this kind of tool. Be aware that the Image Creator does less well with proper nouns, such as specific celebrity or product/business names, so keeping it generic is a good idea. Historical figures are a possibility for aligning with curriculum topics, however!

For more on AI tools useful in education, check out Ditch that Textbook’s terrific overview.

Happy creating, and Happy Halloween!

We have previously discussed (06-18-2018) the potential of the incredibly popular game Minecraft for developing narrative language skills through the use of Story Grammar Marker^®. At that time, I had described the game as potentially too complicated to use as an actual tool in activities, but I have since rethought that. The iPad version ($5.99) will allow you to create a simple “world” (use the Creative mode) and the building interface is easy to learn, operating much like LEGOs. As a result, spaces can be used to scaffold language for describing settings.

Minecraft Education, on the other hand, offers a specialized, structured collection of Worlds you can use for both narrative and expository language. The software is available to anyone with a Microsoft 365 account and usable on a laptop, desktop, or again on the iPad. Within the Education menus you can use built-in activities providing exploration of biomes, which can be used to generate language in conjunction with a SGM Setting Descriptive Map.

More structured learning experiences are available through the Worlds menus and Subject Kits, and are also described on the Minecraft Education website, complete with supporting lesson plans. We may gravitate towards ELA contexts, but also note that many of the science and social studies lessons contain narrative and expository opportunities!

An example in the ELA kits is Characters All Around, where students explore and “meet” several characters in order to practice character description. This would be a natural opportunity for using the SGM Character Descriptive Map.

On the social studies side, you can consider an activity like Landmarks in our Community. I am currently using this activity with a student in conjunction with building world knowledge through reading landmarks-related books in the always useful EPIC! Books for Kids (free with an educator account). The “World” is simply an open space in which you can build a landmark–we started with the simple creation of a park with paths and green blocks.

Don’t miss that there is also a Social-Emotional category that contains well-designed experiences including The Mindful Knight, which you can use to explore feelings vocabulary and self-regulation.

I hope you enjoy exploring and building!