Making Movies, Making Inferences - Ep. 82
This episode describes using movie making to teach inferencing and perspective taking. Just learning the language to express different perspectives is challenging, let alone understanding theory of mind. One way to tackle this gordian knot is through movie making and narration. Clients get a kick out of making movies, and SLP’s get a kick out of the extensive learning taking place. The episode covers:
Choosing the book to turn into a movie
- Setting- promoting a thorough understanding
- Narration and Rehearsal
- An unexpected finding
- Who is this for?
- Tips for a smooth process and progress monitoring
- Results
The good news is, it’s not that difficult or time consuming once you have a process down. Tune in for all the tips and tricks to make this work in your practice, then watch the magic of learning commence.
Take a look at this complete movie activity package for the delightful book, Gregory, the Terrible Eater, by Mitchell Sharmat, available at The Speech Umbrella.
--- Useful Links ---
Climbing the Social Detective Ladder
Thinking About YOU Thinking About ME
Gregory, the Terrible Eater Story Activity
Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission
Transcript
Denise: Welcome to the Speech Umbrella, this show that explores simple but powerful therapy techniques for optimal outcomes. I'm Denise Stratton, a pediatric speech language pathologist of 30 plus years. I'm closer to the end of my career than the beginning, and along the way, I've worked long and hard to become a better therapist. Join me as we explore the many topics that fall under our umbrellas as SLPs. I want to make your journey smoother. I've found the best therapy comes from employing simple techniques with a generous helping of mindfulness.
Hello. Welcome to episode 82 of the Speech Umbrella podcast. As I'm sure you know, April is Autism Awareness Month, and I have some super effective therapy activities I can't wait to share with you. Both episodes this month include activities you can do with clients who are on the spectrum. Today's episode is about inferencing and perspective taking. Now, teaching someone to make inferences is elusive because there is so much background knowledge and noticing that comes into play.
Most people aren't even aware they're putting two and two together to make four, it just comes so naturally to most of us. But when you have these three things, background knowledge, noticing and synthesizing or putting it all together, you end up with a sum is greater than the parts scenario that is pretty hard for some of our clients to do.
So the question is, how do you teach this? How do you make the implicit explicit? I did a podcast about this earlier, that was episode 53, called Climbing the Social Detective Ladder, about how to teach inferencing with books. Here's a quick summary of episode 53. As we read with our clients, we notice the themes that they aren't used to noticing, and we make them obvious.
We talk about where the characters are and what's happening, we talk about who the characters are and what their plans are, and as we read, we stop and ask questions like, what did you notice? Or what do you think the plan was? And we follow up with what makes you say that? Or how do you know? And also we can add in acting out the story, retelling it, and making lists of what they noticed.
And while I still love everything I talked about in that podcast, I had a client who wasn't able to infer or take perspectives even after I did all of those things. I did a lot of it and we still weren't getting anywhere. So I took a deeper dive and I made an unexpected discovery, which is what inspired today's podcast.
We turned books into mini movies, which my client narrated and this movie making was what finally started to move the needle for her. This episode is called Making Movies, Making Inferences, and let me tell you, this is so much fun, hard work, but fun, once you've got your movie making process down, it's a fantastic intervention and it doesn't need to take a lot of prep time.
I've spent the past few months getting my processes down, and that's what I'm sharing today. Here's what I'll be covering: choosing your book, the setting, narration and rehearsal, my unexpected finding, who is this for, tips I've got to make this process smooth for you and to track progress, the results, and a product I have to get you started.
I think you're gonna wanna try this for yourself, so here we go. Choosing your book. I also did a podcast on this. It's episode 52. It's called Choose Your Books Wisely. In a nutshell, you want to look for a book with a clear story arc, a book where all the events are relevant to the main story, one that has lots of opportunities to infer and take different perspectives, inferences that are really clear and not murky to the child, and a bit of humor and absurdity helps it go down really well.
I cover all of that in episode 52, so head over there for an in-depth discussion. Now, let me add, when you're making a movie, also consider this: how easy it will be to gather props. Does the book have complications, so the character has to make repeated attempts to solve the problem. And how easy will it be to show the different perspectives as the client is narrating the movie.
After you've chosen the book, read it together and discuss what kind of props you'll need. This helps you get ready for the setting. I've placed a lot of emphasis on setting for two reasons. So a change in setting usually marks a change in the story or the ending of a mini episode within the larger story.
And these are really important to the story arc and therefore to inferring thoughts, feelings, and plans. Settings don't necessarily drive thoughts, feelings, and plans of the characters, but if your client doesn't have a firm grasp on the settings, they will struggle to make the leap to inferencing. Their story will be fuzzy in their minds. And my other reason is talking about the setting helps clients get immersed in the story, immersed in the characters' thoughts and feelings and plans.
And to that end, here's what I do to emphasize setting. This does require some prep work. I divide the story into different scenes and I make scene cards. I do this before we even start making the movie, so that we all know how many scenes we have to film. I even print the titles with dotted tracing letters on cardstock so my clients can trace the letters as we talk about the scene they'll be doing, and this is why I purposely name the scene cards with a title that inspires questions.
Here's an example with the book Round Robin. So Round Robin is a bird who's too fat to fly south when fall comes. And I named one of the scenes Trouble Going South, that naturally inspires questions such as what kind of trouble and what was Round Robin's plan. And we discuss these questions as they prepare the scene cards.
I use whatever props I can gather to help immerse them in the story, dolls, animal figurines, toy vehicles, laminated pictures, you name it and I've used it. Narration and rehearsal. Here is where the magic happens. This is a narrated movie, not one that is acted out by the client. The client is using the props to aid in their narration.
With this format, the client can then create sentences that explain what is implied along with narrating the events. So the best way to explain this is with one of the movies we made, let's take No Roses for Harry by Gene Zion. Harry is a not too happy recipient of a handmade sweater. And what makes matters worse is that it's a sweater with a pattern of roses, which Harry thinks is absolutely silly. Harry does everything he can think of to get rid of that sweater, but kind people keep returning it to him, and when it seems like he'll never lose the sweater, he unexpectedly has helped with losing it.
Because my client is narrating both the events and what is implied, she got to say not only Harry left his sweater in the pet store, but a man gave it back. That's the event narration. But then she got to add, Harry wanted to lose the sweater because it looked silly, but the man gave it back to him because he thought he wanted it. And this is the perspective narration. This is what's usually implied. This is what our clients need help understanding. I have my clients use thought bubbles above the character's heads when they talk about the character's thoughts and plans to really drive home the concept of different characters having different thoughts.
Now let's talk about rehearsal. Each scene usually consists of one to three sentences and I video each scene separately. I have them hold up the scene card and say, scene one, Harry gets a sweater, or whatever it is, kind of to introduce the scene. And then we talk through the scene and I model how I would narrate it, and then I help them craft sentences that make sense.
They don't have to copy my sentence. It just needs to make sense and explain either the event or what's implied. We rehearse it until they can say it, and then I video it. Often, we need to do retakes. That's just like the real movies, and that's what I tell 'em. We're just doing a retake. So we do retakes until their explanation makes sense, and sometimes I need to help them break down complex interactions into more than one sentence, just so they don't get wrapped around the axle language-wise, a lot of the learning that takes place centers on how well they use conjunctions and mental verbs, not surprisingly. If you run into difficulties, model and rehearse, model and rehearse. Some days you don't get many scenes filmed, and that's okay. The kids are still having fun. They love this. A lot of learning is happening.
One thing that I have done is model stepping on a series of markers for sentence parts. Not one marker per word, but one marker per clause. And then we compare how many markers we each used and how our sentences were the same or different. And this especially helps if they're new to this kind of narration and it helps them with focus and memory.
Now let's talk about my unexpected finding. The underlying problem with my client who struggled to infer was actually an expressive language problem, but because she could retell stories with complications and use cemental verbs and conjunctions in conversation, that led me to believe she could explain inferences and different perspectives. But she really lacked the ability to form the kind of complex sentences needed to explain what was implied. I thought that she needed to work on understanding what characters, thoughts, feelings, and plans were, because she couldn't explain those things to me. But as we were making these movies, what I saw was she actually lacked the language to explain them.
And so how are you going to measure if someone comprehends what's implicit? If they don't have the language to tell you? There is no way to measure her understanding of this until her language got better. And this led me to speculate that perhaps her struggle with inferring was a cause of language ability needing to proceed thought ability for an example of how complex and involved language can get, take this example from No Roses for Harry. So after Harry manages to lose his sweater, he's overjoyed until he gets home and finds out grandma is coming. Grandma's the one who made him the sweater. Everybody is looking for his sweater because they believe she will want to see him wearing it. So then Harry gets worried about hurting her feelings.
Also, only Harry knows what really happened to the sweater, while his family looks all over the house. That is such a mouthful to explain, and that scene took several tries when filming. In fact, I was just about to help her simplify her narration when she figured it out, and she got it. I think it's really ironic that one of the questions I asked my clients when we're working on inferencing is, how do you know that? And yet I made an incorrect judgment of my own that her main problem was inferring when it was actually more oral language based. So what's really, really useful to ask ourselves, how do I know? How do I know this problem is a pragmatic language problem or an oral language based problem, or a combination of both.
Okay. Let's talk about who this is for. Well, anyone who needs help with inferring and perspective taking, or anyone who needs help using complex language. It's fantastic for clients with autism, but doesn't have to be limited to that group. I use this with the first grader who was working on combining sentences using conjunctions and word retrieval. His language was moderately to mildly delayed, but he couldn't quite make the leap he needed when he was retelling more basic stories and these movies did the trick. His first movie took a long time to complete. Then something clicked in his brain and he breezed through his second movie in one day. He did all the scenes in one day, retrieving words, combining sentences all over the place.
It was just amazing. Soon after that session, his mom said when she picked him up from school, he talked all the way home and they had quite a drive home from his school. And that was a first for him as he was usually really reluctant to talk very much. And he graduated from therapy very soon after that.
And by the way, I'm sure you could adapt this to group therapy, take turns narrating the story, or whatever you need to do to make a fit with a group. Perspective taking is kind of tricky, so if you're wondering how age levels relate to perspective taking, this quote from Thinking About You, Thinking About Me by Michelle Garcia Winner is really helpful. Quote, perspective taking abilities are on a spectrum. Students change rapidly during their preschool and early elementary years. Thus, it is important to postpone assessing the perspective taking level of a student before third grade. Close quote. So my client that I'm talking about who struggled with inferring was in third grade when we started making movies, and I really don't think she could have done it earlier. She is on the autism spectrum. Someone who's working on the language aspect without the pragmatic piece could do it younger, like the first grader I talked about.
Now, here's some tips to make this work smoothly for you. Prepare all your materials and props beforehand. This may seem like a no-brainer, but take it from me, I ran around gathering all my stuff up before every therapy session. I only did that the first movie, and then I wised up and kept everything together till we were done filming that movie. Keep it all together in a box or a folder until you're done. And this includes printing your scene cards beforehand.
Make sure your equipment is charged and you have the necessary memory and cards. This next part is really important, and I know because I didn't do it at first and I paid later. After filming each session, take the time to delete the unwanted scenes and name and number the video clips you do want and place them in a folder. This is going to make putting the movie together very fast. If you number each scene in order, then you'll know what order to drag and drop into iMovie and this bears repeating, separate your unwanted and wanted clips. Trust me, this will save your sanity. The last thing you want to do is spend hours going through movie clips to find the best ones the night before therapy, because you promised your client it would be done and you're gonna have a movie party the next day with popcorn and candy, okay? Been there, done that. Not fun.
So keep it all organized and you'll love yourself. Now, sometimes as I'm reviewing clips after our therapy session, I think, oh, you know, she could have said that better. He could have narrated that part better. And I want to redo that. Why, just make a note of that so we can do it the next session. And sometimes they will say the first half the sentence so well, and then they go off track or they muff up the first part, then the last half the sentence is just beautiful. And you may want to preserve both of those. Well, I tried splicing a couple of those partial sentences together to get that fantastic sentence and I don't recommend it. It, it's just way too much work. It's better to just get the best you can and go on or try again the next session.
So after all, this is a learning process and what they can't say today, they may be able to say next week. When I say a sentence needs to make sense, I don't mean it has to be flawlessly delivered. I love sentences where my clients self-correct, they struggle for the right word and come up with it, or they have just a few grammatical errors as they figure out how to say new things. Those are gold to me. They show the learning process and we use them. We leave them right in the movie. Listen to a clip of this client talking about Harry after he loses a sweater and knows grandma is coming.
Harry knew the sweater was gone, but the children, the children looked for the sweater because Harry, because grandma might be want, want to see Harry wear it's.
Those sentences became part of her movie, and she was so proud. Finally, I print out a checklist of scenes and as we complete the movie scenes, we check them off and this helps 'em see their progress and they get a little excited about, oh, have we finished scene three? Are we doing scene four today? They're really excited about that. Also, it helps me. Before I started checking off the scenes, I missed some things filming and we had to go back and film some things at the very end, just like a real movie. But I'd rather not have to go back and film things at the end if I don't have to. Then it's just drag and drop into iMovie or whatever you use for making movies, and you can have a little movie party or a big movie party when you completed.
So let's talk about results. A question I had as I was starting this process was how to measure progress, and I decided to take pre and post movie measures of their ability to answer inference questions. Now, at the time, I didn't realize I would also be working on complex sentence formation. Well, here's how the data played out for those inference questions. My client with autism, the one in third grade, showed no change between the first movies pre and post question. I wasn't too discouraged because by then I'd figured out we were dealing with oral language as a prerequisite to answering these questions, and I'd already seen some improvement there.
It wasn't until the pre-movie questions for the fourth movie that I saw significant change in her ability to answer inference questions. Now, this was on the pre-movie questions after reading the book, but before we started the movie. So the takeaway is narrating movies required her to use language inferring and perspective taking to use words like know, thought, believed, wondered in sentences with clauses, and this is what brought about the positive change. So she didn't necessarily need to make a movie to understand by the fourth movie how to make inferences and take perspectives on that movie, it was the whole process. All the movies we'd done before led her to the point where she did really well in answering the pre-movie questions and even the language she used to answer the questions matured. So I started audio recording her answers as a way to measure that oral language progress.
What's happening is she is increasing the content units she can include in a single. If you're familiar with the TILLS test, that's test of integrated language and literacy skills, you know about the written sub-test that has you score content units and more sophisticated language users include more content in a single sentence, and that is exactly what is happening here with her oral language, combined with theory of mind content, and it's awesome to see.
So before these movies, she could combine sentences and have more content units if she wasn't using theory of mind language. Taking people's perspectives and having to explain inferences. And now I'm thinking about teaching her to summarize the movie, but I'll need to check on whether she's ready for that, cuz that's a high flying skill. And I've started asking her to explain why she likes the book we chose at the beginning of her movie as a way to introduce it. So you see there are definitely ways to extend this activity.
Based on what I learned about oral language really being the issue, I can see you wouldn't need to make movies to get this result necessarily. There are other things you could do, but now that I have started, have a process down, I really love this approach for teaching both language and theory of mind. I have a file on every movie we've done, and I can be ready at a moment's notice to implement it with any client who will benefit.
If you would love to have a ready-made movie file, I have one for you. It's from the book, Gregory, the Terrible Eater by Mitchell Sharmat. This particular movie works really well with just using pictures as props, so no other materials are needed other than a way to display the pictures. I laminate my illustrations and I put, um, sticky Velcro on the back, so they'll stick to a flannel board. But you could also use magnets or whiteboard, you could use tape, whatever works for you. And if you don't have the book, you can watch it on YouTube. It's available there. The movie file I'm offering has the illustrations, the scene cards, and a checklist of scenes. You can find Gregory the Terrible Eater movie product on my store at thespeechumbrella.com slash store, or on TPT by searching the Speech Umbrella on TPT.
Well, that's it for today. If you decide to try this, drop me a line and let me know how it's working. I'd love to hear about it, and join me in two weeks. I'm going to the other end of the autism spectrum to talk about the littlest of our clients, preschoolers with autism. So you know, sometimes when you master the language of inferring, you master inferring itself. Talk to you next time.
Thanks for listening to the Speech Umbrella. We invite you to sign up for the free resource library at thespeechumbrella.com. You'll get access to some of Denise's best tracking tools, mindfulness activities, and other great resources to take your therapy to the next level. All this is for free at thespeechumbrella.com. If you've enjoyed this podcast, subscribe and please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and other podcast directories.
