Lecka, cumulative narrative chunking is the same thing Moreau puts in all the other materials. Well this is my 3rd day of fevers and I'm very grouchy. I don't know if it's turning to pneumonia or not, sigh, so I'm watching it. Progression in narrative ability: A case study comparing successive ... This article is interesting. Mentions intonation, performance, memorization. Just gets the mind thinking about the things that are missing from SGM.

When we drove the Oregon coast, we use a Frommer's guide to plan everything. They have one specific to Oregon and another for the whole coast (Seattle to CA) https://www.amazon.com/Frommers-EasyGuide-Seattle-Portland-EasyGuides/dp/1628873809/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1526360614&sr=8-2&keywords=frommer's+guide+oregon&dpID=512YnreAqnL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch There aren't a lot of hotels on the coast, but you might make out ok winging it. The one thing I would do is call ahead for dinner reservations. Some of the restaurants on the coast are AMAZING, totally amazing, and they can get busy for dinner. The redwoods needed a solid half day at least. The caverns in southern Oregon (it was a national park) were unique and worth doing if you like caverns. The mailbag airboat rides on the Rogue river are worth doing. The southern part of the Oregon coast is fine, but the northern part is more interesting, at least to me. It starts to fizzle as you go south, and in the part that fizzles there will be less of things (less restaurants, etc.). At least that's how I remember it. So don't feel compelled to make your time on the coast even, if that makes sense. There are places to pull over and watch whales. There's so much that's beautiful, you definitely won't want to rush. I can see the idea of the drone, but I don't know what would happen if it gets windy or something. Might be sad. Obviously he knows what he's doing. It's just some pretty rough terrain. Our trip was several years ago, but I think we spent a whole week doing mainly the coast. We went in and did the Columbia River Gorge, hiking the falls, and flying to Mt. St. Helens one day. But other than that, it was all the coast. There's that much. You could add a couple days, if you're wanting to linger. The food is amazing and there are lots of things to do, including history stuff, boat tours, kite shops, umbrella shops. You can spend hours just on the side watching whales. Me, I like the food when I travel. There was a restaurant so good, you just wanted to stay a few extra days and eat again and again, lol. Enjoy your trip! :)

I think you're right that not everything happens just because you work on it. I meet lots of kids at our social skills therapy place who get an hour of speech for expressive language a week, and they still don't have tons coming out. And I think they do assess and go diminishing returns, more hours wouldn't get us more. With ds, right now, more hours is getting us more. He's literally sucking up 2-3 hours a day of this, and the more we do, the more he smiles and seems connected and enthused. It's good interaction, but I think it's kind of a just right challenge. We'll probably continue at this pace until we hit walls and it becomes evident we're not gaining like we were. I think he had a backlog of untapped capabilities, things he was ready to do that needed to be unleashed. When a dc has been getting therapy all along, they wouldn't have that. We'll see if this lung mess goes to pneumonia. I've been in bed two days now, sigh, just up for breaks and variety. I don't know if I'm going to pull it out or not. Will probably be obvious tomorrow morning. I got exposed to a virus at the IEP meeting 3 weeks ago, and I think I was so stressed my body just held onto it and didn't fight. I keep having headaches and fatigue for 3 weeks but not getting sick. Now I'm out and out sick, with fevers, etc. sigh. Dh worked with ds a bit today, which was funny, haha. They were doing fine on the category work, because that was little games (play tic tac toe by listing things in the category on the square, etc.). My next move will be to watch the NDT tool videos, because those are specific to ASD. I'm really interested to hear what she says about developing narratives in autism. She may have a progression, like you say, dunno.

I'm not necessarily going to hire another SLP for language in July when my higher funding starts. I have other things to use that money for, and I'm enjoying doing this work with him.

The audio on this video improves at 8 minutes in. She explains how you go from SGM narrative to expository. Kinda long, but should be good. Interestingly, she says that when she developed SGM in 1991 she was working in a school for dyslexia. She wanted the markers to help the students ask questions to develop their narratives. It WASN'T a tool developed for autism by someone working with autism, which might explain the holes and the assumptions. There's this assumption that if they have those points they can create a narrative, that the parts will lead to the whole. They also seem to start with larger sources, where WTM still has young children narrating (strictly retelling) brief sources, even for expository/informational writing. The video is a little tedious, but it will probably be useful. I'm 20 minutes in on the 1:40, tick tock.

Here's a video where she spends an hour explaining Braidy.

http://speechymusings.com/2016/04/12/conversation-cell-phones/ this is cute. http://speechymusings.com/2017/02/13/no-prep-game-to-target-describing/ This game would work well when working on attributes, and it doesn't cost anything.

Ok, look at something like this from blog. http://speechymusings.com/2013/02/13/comprehending-and-paraphrasing-expository-texts/ I LIKE that she's turning narrative work into a game. That would be HUGE with my ds. Love, love. It seems like this could be a *step* in the process. Definitely good to turn it into games. Just could see this going a lot further. Since the post was made in 2013, maybe she matured her thinking or developed more steps?

Found what the ps SLP was liking from TPT. https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Learning-and-Identifying-Story-Grammar-Parts-in-Narratives-3451176 This SLP reviews MW/SGM on her blog, so you may have already seen that. Looks like she also has a middle school language kit too. Here's a blog post from that TPT vendor, and what's interesting is I'm not sure she's actively using the MW visuals, hmm. I thought I had read SGM reviews on her site, but she's showing different visuals in a Nov 2017 blog post. Maybe these are the visuals in her TPT kit?? Yup, that first link, peach with the owl, is the stuff that is pictured and explained fully on her blog post here. http://speechymusings.com/2017/11/25/teaching-story-grammar-parts-narratives/ It's interesting. It's much more in line with the stuff I buy from other SLP sources. It could be more flexible/rearrangeable, because you could print her tokens on magnets and rearrange them on a board or laminate and put magnets on the back to rearrange. MW clearly goes much, much farther. Their story maps, where they show how to expand the concept of setting into a descriptive paragraph, how to use the pieces to build a more sophisticated essay, etc. are terrific. But really, the SLP at our ps is saying she uses this simple $10 kit with SGM. I'm guessing she uses SGM for the maps? That would be kind of confusing to go back and forth with the symbols. I don't know. I'm going to explore some more and see what this blog is saying.

This is interesting. It's very wordy compared to something like The Way To A, but it works. Makes you wonder what a behaviorist would be thinking in that situation. I got distracted by the idea of the child being implied to that he was bad, etc., but still it's interesting.

Btw, it's a total peeve of mine that the author is constantly citing her (highly verbal, clearly precocious) granddaughter in videos and in the texts. These materials are being used both in classrooms and for intervention services and therapy, but it seems like most of the examples given in the texts are of mainstream classroom use, which really doesn't tell us how it goes with kids with disabilities, even though we assume that's the market. They're presenting at ASHA and saying it's their market, but they're citing mainstream classrooms and precocious kids for their success stories rather than talking about kids with autism. So then flip that and consider the NDT (Narrative and Discourse Builder Tool) from Northern Speech Services. The developer of that has a video course I purchased but haven't watched yet. She actually says she's trying to build narratives in kids with autism, and her tool is more flexible (important with autism to lead away from rigid expectations) and has some extras like matching bubbles to pull down for each main detail where the student can expand with dialogue, etc. I agree MW has pushed the concepts farther, with their maps, sure, but the simple analysis of the NDT and it's ability to hold information in a more flexible, expandable format is possibly more practical. I've got the NDT, and I'm not sure I'm going to return it. I'm not totally convinced that a linear braid is really the best way to teach structure to my ds. I want something flexible and rearrangeable. I think the MW magnets could possibly work well within NDT. I'm not sure I want to go all the way to Inspiration and a more complex approach right now. Oral narratives are supposed to flow naturally. You shouldn't need Inspiration to do them, kwim? When I actually think about how my ds will get out a narrative, I think it's MUCH more likely that NDT will be useful to him than the SGM brain. I like Braidy, and I like OD. I'm just not super sold on their middle stage. But again, I'm just brain dumping my thought process. We had a poster some time ago saying she was putting a lot of emphasis on narration with her ASD kids, and now a bunch of us are like ok this is a really important step. But there's a gap from knowing you need to do it to figuring out how to do it. And the point of SGM seems to be that if they understood the structure they would get it out. I'm not sure that's the case. i think it can more just result in cryptic, non-natural narratives that are hyper-condensed and don't flow. I'm not saying it HAS to, but it clearly would happen with my ds if you just plunked him in with an SLP trying to race to the end. They don't have 4 hours a week for a school year to work on this, and that's the kind of devotion it would take with my ds, seems to me, to do Braidy, to develop that foundation in a natural, full, rounded, engaging, communicative way. There's seemingly little discussion of the actual LANGUAGE of the narratives, what defines genres, tone, style. With a student like mine, I'd like to develop some tone and style within a simple narrative or expository structure before expanding to longer structures. What would that look like to tell a simple retelling as a fable vs. an epic vs. ... There's no discussion of changing time or place or adding details. All of our stuff we know needs to happen from our progymnasta is just not being mentioned in MW. The SLPs are not writing experts. They don't know progymnasta. In reality, CC (Common Core) isn't so far off from progym. But there's a lot more that could happen with MW that would be EASY to make happen with modification. So that, to me, is where I see something like Braidy in 4th grade, OD with WWS in high school, and in-between steps where you expand Braidy/SGM and fit it to a progym sequence of medium length sources (CAP's series, Writing Tales, whatever). For my ds to do those from 5th-8th would be pretty astonishing. Again, just more thinking out loud. But that's why I've been thinking so hard about how they merge, whether the methodology is rigid or can be made more flexible to fit a more typical WTM/SWB + progym progression. If I can get there, that's where I'd like to be. If I can't, I can't. I think it could be fun. I've always had this faint impression that ds is actually language GIFTED under his language ability. I don't know why I've believed that, but it underlies everything I'm doing. I think he's been glitched up, and someday it will come out.

Just for fun, if someone buys OD based on what I wrote there and hates it, doesn't find it useful, send it to me and I'll buy it off you. :) Also, it looks like they ran some pretty crazy 1/2 price deals last December. You never know what they'll do, but they might do that again. Might let people stagger if they don't need everything at once.

https://mindwingconcepts.com/pages/presentations These are the slides for a bunch of their recent ASHA talks. At this point, what I'm trying to sort out is how their expository writing books overlap or progress. They have: -Talk to Write, Write to Learn--2008, 248 pages, narrative and expository maps, 5 paragraph essay, book choices and probably target ages/grades are lower than Thememaker -The Core of the Core--2012, no TOC show in sample to tell pages, maps will be closest to what would be useful for classical/WTM style narrations, since CC, as written in the standards, parallels WTM writing, the maps look very useful, however their presentation of the CC standards is very brief and oversimplified to emphasize how their product can fit the standards rather than explaining, at least in the samples, how far you have to stretch the methodology to actually make all that happen. Not saying you can't, but it really needs effort to bolster it for WTM writing. MW seems to have this fettish with analyzing scenes, and nobody wants to narrate just a scene out of a book, mercy. We want them to get the gestalt, the big picture, recognize the most important part of the flow of a book. Now maybe they hit that in Thememaker and give some better tools? Dunno. I see a big gap between the writing the ps is trying to make happen (based on the comments in the book of schools using it) and what we might think in our mind is logical to make happen. -Thememaker--2008, 237+ pages, focuses on expository, starts with very complex sources for the lessons and seems to be focused on comprehension (extracting components from a larger text and discussing and boiling them down) rather than the beginner steps of small text for tight purpose (1st grade info retelling, 2nd grade info retelling, etc.). Seems to go into very complex territory (arguments, cause/effect, etc.) I think if you were only asking about CoC vs. Thememaker for someone starting in lower grades, CoC could go first, bridge from Braidy/SGM to expository, and THEN you'd come in with Thememaker. For someone starting older, the question would be whether you want them to start with larger works where they extract ideas or whether they should practice with shorter texts and stick to a more targeted goal. There's nothing babyish about CoC, and there's no reason why you can't go through a progression from brief model to larger source. I would note that even WWS isn't asking the student to do something as challenging as Thememaker, because Thememaker literally seems to assume a student can read a book and pull from it all these debates and facts and points. WWS gives the student the points and asks him to organize and retell cohesively. That would be an in-between step. I think for my student Thememaker might be high school or completely out of reach. Unless there's a way to simplify it down conceptually. My guess is the books are good but their thought process is not as tight as it could be with the models/sources. So it might be possible to use the maps but use them with more appropriate text. We also don't know how the maps differ or overlap between CoC and TM. You can buy just the map downloads btw, $15. So that is an option too, once you get one of the products and are clicking. You might just buy the maps from the other and move forward. At this point, I think for where my ds is (rising 4th by age, much lower for narrative ability), I'm probably looking at T2W and CoC. The Thememaker Expository Text Structures poster/mini poster shows the 7 structures (descriptive, list, sequence, cause/effect, problem/solution, persuade, compare/contrast). To me, those are super similar to your WWS toolbox stuff. So then you go ok, would you be able to target a structure (descriptive), beginning with the most tight level (Braidy or pseudobraidy but age appropriate with pages off TPT) and then do it with a little more complex and so on. I think it's notable who blithely CoC and all the materials skip that the major steps need expansion. There are no tools to mark dialogue, nothing to mark details. It's all just a super linear presentation, with the seeming assumption that narratives will fit that order (which they don't), that the student will be able to expand those bead/detail steps (maybe they have maps for this?), and that the student will be able to link them together to create an actual flow (which he might or might not). I think it has potential as a tool, but I just see these instructional weaknesses. I think the user would have to be constantly correcting, making sure they get whole narratives and don't focus on the analysis, making sure they do real retellings of real material and not searching high and low to find sources that fit a particular scheme. I think Braidy could be an amazing starting point for students on the spectrum. I think how old would depend on the humor and flexibility of the child. It uses children's literature, tight sources, and of course simpler sources are entertaining, disarming, and clear. What better way to teach a skill than to go to the easiest point, bring it very within reach, and build forward? There's no reason why you couldn't go from descriptions in children's lit to descriptions in magazines that are age appropriate and of special interest to descriptions in lit on their reading level, kwim? You could go through a progression like that. The SLP at our ps said that she starts everyone with SGM, mainly because it's what she has, LOL, but that she has to go back and do those breakouts with TPT lessons. I'll go look for what she was using and link. I liked the look of the Braidy lessons, so I think I'd rather start there. I'm looking for the simplest, smallest piece of the skill, so I can get him confident there and move forward. The SLP at the ps just wanted to get them advanced as quickly as possible, and I want him SUCCESSFUL by building a foundation. I stand by my comment that FFC is the foundation for all this work. This coming week we begin attributes (I'm sick today), and I'm excited to see how far we can get with attributes and how that creates a language foundation for him to be ABLE to do the descriptive tasks in MW. To me there's a total flow there. I'm trying to organize his brain to think that way and get his brain noticing it before I show him some symbol and am frustrated that very little comes out. For me, the detailed, age-appropriate, challenging FFC work is creating the foundation for MW. -Oral Discourse Strategies---2015, 125+ pages, NOW we're finally getting somewhere! This book bills itself as the advanced material. Page 9 shows a structure for analysis that would work well with WWS. MW is not set up to do that, because MW is persistently linear. However if you want to know how to get MW to bridge to WWS, that's how it would work. You would probably have to do it with the magnet sets or, better, Inpsiration software. If you made templates in Inspiration to fit those structures or if you made laminated pages that you kept to the side to show the student, you could work through the structures, one at a time, and assemble larger essays, WTM-style. And I'm saying within say a month of focusing on an expository structure, you could go from Braidy to Theme/OD, all the way. At least in theory you could. That would be intense, like doing a brief model every day, analysis to oral narration, every day, boom boom. You definitely could get there. If the student has the LANGUAGE to get it out, he could get there. If he doesn't have the language, then we're backing up to that how do we get the language. My ds wasn't using active verbs (function), can't describe things (features), etc. So he needed language work before he could do those steps. There are slideshows for all these programs probably on that MW link. The OD has one, because that was how I found the rest. I'm looking at the OD sample, and look at how they included language bubbles. Those could be used for dialogue. This could go SO much farther. The analysis could be less linear and more REAL. You could unhitch the MW symbols from the highly linear, fixed SGM braided tool and do them in inspiration on a whiteboard entirely, using them to retell real material of high interest to the student. The trick there is not to use ALL the tools. The trick is to find real material and only use one or two of the magnets or pieces of analysis. I think the emphasis on a complete episode can be misleading, since writers DON'T always write that way. The more the person teaching with these tools understands writing and the tools, the more they can divorce themselves from the material and go at it a different way. The irony is, at that point they'll be doing what WTM says to do, haha. The methodologies are totally compatible, and the OD book is your best chance maybe at seeing that. With my dd, straight ADHD, the SWB toolbox approach was a good fit because it fit her non-linear thought process. I think a very linear approach would tend to exacerbate the rigid tendencies of ASD. What I don't know is whether the ASD student is actually developmentally ready to get there, or whether it's like nice thought, not necessary, give a briefer structure that works and move on with life, kwim? Like lots of things are good, but they aren't necessarily good NOW. It might be something that would click later, much later. I can't speak to that, only saying I think the possibility exists. In theory, if you believe what you read from the Left-Brained people and all that, then kids on the spectrum *should* be non-linear thinkers who benefit from a toolbox approach, ie. going all the way to OD. Like it might be that OD would give them the big picture and make MORE sense than starting off in the middle with SGM. They might do better with OD plus BRAIDY. Seriously. I could totally see that. I think all that matters is that it's clicking, not what the age on the book says. To give someone the big picture and then go back and work through the parts from the very beginning (OD to Braidy then back to OD), that could actually work. Says the woman who doesn't have a dc of that age. I'll go look for the TPT stuff. I could eat crow on all this. I'm just trying to sort it out myself. I'm seeing these 4 books, all hitting expository, and I was trying to figure out how they overlap, who the targets were. The reason T2W doesn't fit the flow of the rest is it was mainly authored by the MW people's BIL. Now he's probably super awesome, but that's probably why it's this anomaly in the series. If it was written in the same year as Thememaker, maybe there was collaboration going on and they said hey go run with your vision on this? I also don't know how the maps overlap. That's as far as I got.

If you're an undermethylator and you take 5HTP, can you tell me about how you got those things in balance? We're trying to figure this out for my dd. She's homozygous for the TPH2 defect, meaning she needs 5HTP, but she's also heterozygous for C677T of the MTHFR, meaning she's slightly undermethylated. The 5HTP pulls down your methyl levels. How did you get it figured out to get the 5HTP levels up without making yourself feel worse? She's having trouble putting into words what she's feeling. Any articles or things that helped you?

Kbutton, have you seen the paraphrasing workbooks from the Spotlight series (Linguisystems)? http://www.linguisystems.com/products/product/display?itemid=10482 http://www.linguisystems.com/products/product/display?itemid=10317 Ds is almost finished with his categories work for the week. Hopefully just one more day will do it. Next we start into attributes. I got the SPARK for Attributes book and the Spotlight on Vocab book for Attributes. We're almost done with the Spotlight on Main Ideas, hopefully with just one more week, so we'll probably go into the Spotlight on Details next. I'm eyeing the SPARC for Basic Routines, because I think it has a lot of potential to be done multiple ways. They're super tight, super brief sequences, very relatable stuff for him. I think it might work. Maybe this book would interest Lecka? It would definitely be in the realm of talking about your everyday. I was watching a video the author of the VBA book (I forget her name) put on her FB feed. She was talking about the pitfalls of teaching carrier phrases. I thought it was interesting, because there's definitely that potential with the work I'm doing for it to turn into carrier phrases. Worked on our IEP with the school today. The ps SLP is over the moon for SGM and thought it would be awesome for ds. Categories have turned out to be pretty easy for ds, but that's nice to have an easier week. I'm thinking attributes are gonna be a bear.

Look, make it simple. He has issues with transitions and he's motivated by his music practice. He needs to wake up and do a fair chunk of his school work before he can practice music. He'll eat faster, work with less delays, etc. Are the transitions affecting all of life or only academics?

Do you know how to do a google site search? You go to your google bar and put in your terms plus site:welltrainedmind.com So if we've had threads on what you want to know (3rd grade dyslexic math, whatever), they'll show up. And of course you can always start threads here, on LC. I've spent a lot of time doing board searches like that, because I wanted to see how things end up. You get to hear voices from the past, see what they did, and follow them. Like you might like what LoriD wrote about doing math in 3rd grade and you might keep searching for her other posts on math over the years, kwim?

I'm not sure the board groups are private anyway, because their posts show up on google searches. You might think about what you need, whether it's anonymity or freedom to vent or emotional support or solutions or what. You can write someone privately, back channel, with a pm, maybe cc in a few other people that you think would be helpful, and there you go, your own private discussion. It won't show up on google search, it won't be connected to your real name like a FB group. It won't be perfectly secure, either, in the sense that someone from the correspondence could take out what you've written and discuss or repost it elsewhere. But in the scheme of things, for privacy, when you want to let your hair down, that's a way.

https://www.amazon.com/MoKo-All-New-Amazon-Generation-Release/dp/B0732LT96L/ref=pd_sbs_425_6?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B0732LT96L&pd_rd_r=XFMQ10V69E2WF3NJKGEX&pd_rd_w=ibG8E&pd_rd_wg=qKdVs&psc=1&refRID=XFMQ10V69E2WF3NJKGEX The case I'm using with ds right now is like this. Might be a different brand, but they're all the same stuff probably. So $10-15 for a reasonable case to survive typical wear. I used to keep it in a folio case that had a cover. It was fine, but he soaked one in the tub and dropped another so forcefully (which sprinting around the house) that it still died. Fortunately, ds has finally settled down. The grippy silicone stuff is nice and ds is calm enough now that not having a cover is survivable. But obviously go for one that fits the extremeness of the dc, lol. My ds killed two kindles over the last few years, so I used to buy them used, etc. That $80 is pretty close to what you'd pay used, and it's new. Even with a case you're still at your budget.

https://www.amazon.com/All-New-Amazon-Fire-HD-8-Tablet-With-Alexa/dp/B01J94T4R2/ref=gbph_tit_m-5_ab0c_0ee340fe?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=f3cf1943-06a5-4643-86b3-9f7ed8faab0c&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-5&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=11851273011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=7WXCJYB1K43C7HQ4R43D&th=1 It's $80 right now for the 32GB model, dual speakers. The 8 has the dual speakers, which help have enough sound for filling a room with audiobooks. You can also download Prime music, Prime videos, whatever. You can then lock those with parental controls to use them only as motivators and rewards. You can do immersion reading. You'll LOVE it. If you want to wait for the model in June, it might be a fuzz faster. Really though, for $80 it's a deal. Put it in a case obviously. I use an inexpensive one. I'll go look for it.

Kindle fire. Get the one with double speakers if possible. They are dropping the prices now because they're coming out with new models in June. The parental controls are AMAZING and you can totally shut down the wifi and password lock it, bam. You can shut down apps with the password parental controls, shut down the camera, anything you want. So basically at that point you have a nice screen, visual cover flow, only audiobooks and alarms, for the pricepoint you wanted. I like the bumped up memory. The teeniest is really small with audiobooks, so you're constantly banging. But, you know, just buy what works. We've done the smallest but the memory one step up is nice. Or put in a memory card? But yeah, definitely kindle. You'll LOVE it. Super parental controls.

Yes! And that's what bothered/concerned me about some of the SLPs I talked with, was that they didn't appreciate that once autism is on the table you have to go back and FFC their brains and do everything expressively as well as receptively. It's not enough, at least for my ds, to jump and want the end product. You still have to acknowledge it's autism and still have to go through and treat it like autism, even if they go through it faster or differently. I'm able to go from a beginning point to a much more complex point pretty quickly with ds, but we're still having to do the skills. The issue I'm seeing is where the therapists want to jump, because they're using kits rather than understanding the developmental progression. They aren't trained on VBA. The SLPs don't know why they need to go back and work on these things, so even when the SLP sources are selling the materials, the SLPs don't realize to use them. So we cross-train, think harder...

Or the word got filed in the wrong place or stored as a chunk or phrase instead of a word with word level meaning. So you might have to organize all the vocabulary he needs for the task by doing categorizing (ooo, FFC!) activities with him. Word retrieval and the FFC organization overlap. So like if he were discussing a book or reading for lit and had names and terms, you might do categorizing activities with them, organizing them different ways. He could build sentences with them too, so like listing all the evil characters and then using adjectives from the reading to create sentences describing (attributes, your FFC again) the characters. And then you could rearrange them by characters early in the book, in the middle of the book, later in the book. Now you're beginning to SGM your FFC, hmm. You could photocopy pictures of them and duplicate as you categorize. Then you could retell from that. I have no clue what he needs. I'm just saying to me the things overlap and feed, one into the next. It sounds complicated probably to you, lol. You always think I overcomplicate. That's what NDT was trying to have them do. It's what I'm saying might be under-powered about SGM, because they're going to need to expand each of those steps, adding description (FFC) to each one, etc. You could tree the whole thing. You could color code in Inspiration using the SGM colors or symbols and use that to expand expository writing. Lots of potential.

There are things I don't know. I'm not an SLP, and I don't know what is good for someone else's kid, kwim? Like I only know MY kid and his particular mix and where he's at. Nuts, half the time my head swirls and I don't even seem to know that, lol. But I'm totally with you that it's not homogenous. It's not that your ds' next step is the same as mine. For ds, putting huge effort into language with SLP materials gets huge bumps, HUGE. Like noticeable, very fast, tangible, exciting. You could literally see his development over the course of a week. But we have friends in the clubs we go to who are maybe a similar number for support level, who work with an SLP (probably 30-60 minutes a week) and their progress isn't so wow. And I really do think it's not just like who is better, who had more money, who did more this or that. I think there's probably just genetic variety, developmental progressions, like REALITY, kwim? So it's the right thing for me to put 2-3 hours a day into speech therapy work for my ds, because doing it brings noticeable improvement. But that doesn't mean it would do that for the next person. Ds is his own person and there are those profiles. That's what our ped told us this week about the genetic testing. He said hospitals look for profiles and make predictions. So I don't think it's fair for someone to feel guilty about what is just honest differences. I want to share what I'm doing with ds, because I think there are kids out there of similar pattern whom it could help. I think it will answer some people's questions. But that doesn't mean my ds' profile is the next person's profile and that what I'm doing fits them. I wish it were that simple. It's definitely not.

I ordered the verb fish kit from Super Duper because they had a small sale (20%) going. I'm planning to use them to work on connector ties, among other things. Ds likes games, so I plan to turn them into games. I got little foam cubes from Dollar Tree, and my thinking is I can put ties on the foam dies, verb tenses (ed, ing, etc.) on cubes, etc. Then you fish two verb fish, roll your cubes, and make a snazzy sentence. You could get really crazy with it. You could use the fish and play it sort of like a storybuilding game (Dixit). You could roll the cube for a connector word and then build the other part of the sentence to go with a single fish. (The baby was crying because his mom left.) Just so many possibilities there. But I think Lecka's right that that doesn't mean that's the right starting point for her ds. It just is what I think will fit my ds well next. So that's what I got. I like the tie kit from MW. I'm looking through their FB feed, and they had a ton of sales in December. So then you can stagger and think about what you don't need for 6 months... Oh, I'm not going to say to him make a snazzy sentence. I'm being sort of hyperbolic there. Snazzy for me means working in a targeted, systematic way through a list of skills. But the end result is snazzy sentences. But limited field, building, really intentional, systematic, yes. I picked that up from another SLP we tried. She was using the fish and it became obvious there were SO many ways to use them once you knew what you wanted to target. I think it's important for my ds to practice the complex grammar/expressive language skills in a simple context. He can't be thinking about what in the world craziness is happening in the funky picture AND do the grammar AND get it out. So we have to start with a super simple picture, limited field, get the concept working, then broaden it out to a wider range of pictures and then to a wider application context (life, literature, conversation, etc.). So that's why the stupid $40 set of fish, because I wanted a narrow field to work on hard concepts before branching out. He can't go out right away, not him, not where he is. Maybe someone else can, but he can't.