Unique Educational Tools
One of our senior staff members, Professor Maryellen Moreau, has developed a unique educational approach for the explicit teaching of comprehension and oral/written expression. The Story Grammar Marker (SGM) ® and the ThemeMaker & Research Writer ® have been used by our students since 1991. These tools are also utilized by a large number of school districts nationwide. Both provide language development at the Discourse Level - where the child learns to converse, comphrehend, narrate, organize and write.
A child's ability to comprehend and express stories (narratives) is vital to academic and social success. The Story Grammar Marker ® allows our students to better understand story components, to retell, focus on details, make predictions, summarize, take a character's perspective, map semantically, express their own and others' points of view, and resolve conflicts. The ThemeMaker & Research Writer ® tool and maps emphasize basic non-fiction (expository) text structures: sequence, description, cause/effect, list, problem/solution, compare/contrast and persuade. These graphic organizers assist students in comprehension, organization, retention and expression of information.
In addition, the well-researched concept of reciprocal teaching is a vital component of the ThemeMaker ® methodology. Iconic based maps facilitate transition from speaking to writing as the ThemeMaker and Research Writer ® is used extensively throughout the content areas of language arts, science and social studies. The SGM ® and ThemeMaker & Research Writer ® are applied to a wide variety of oral and written language tasks as specified in the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks.
"The onsite team also found that the consistent use of the Story Grammar Marker was commendable."- Massachusetts Department of Education