A Camping we will go! (2) - Camping Theme

Our theme for our first week of camp was "Camping Out." The format was pretty much the same across groups (See previous post for the group makeup), with circle time to start, followed by a focused speech & language task (worksheet etc) then an art & craft activity. Here is the breakdown of our activities for each group, with some pictures and resources. I used this site http://www.kidsparkz.com/camping.html quite a bit for ideas and resources.

Explorers

Circle Time (Around the pretend campfire)

Ipad story "Our camping trip" with questions

Song: A camping we will go

Worksheets

Following Directions:

Camping worksheet from "Say and Glue Language for Listening" by Super Super

Vocab Guessing game: What am I? for camping items

Art & Craft

Colouring and making binoculars out of card, then going on a nature walk talking about what we saw.

Discoverers:

Circle time

Around the campfire with musical instruments, playing along to "She'll be coming round the mountain, then switching and requesting another instrument using, gesture, PECS, vocalisation etc.

Worksheets

Look and find camping scene with bears (Not sure where I got it but was glad to find it on my harddrive). Pointing to the object named within the scene (very simple objects like boat, bear etc).

Artic focus- sticking something beginning with each child's target sound on the camping scene.

Art & Craft

Nature walk to find different leaves, then doing leaf rubbings on paper

(Unfortunately I forgot to take pics on this day)

Busy Bees

Almost Identical Activities to Explorers, only change is we did a listening bingo for camping pictures, then worked on prepositions with a big tent that was set up.

Skill Builders

Circle Time

Camping story with Ipad

Going on a bear hunt action rhyme

I'm going camping and I'm going to take...... memory game

Worksheets

Therasimplicity camping scene for barrier game. I played a listening and following directions game where I handed out different pictures to the children then gave directions like " If you have a green sleeping bag put it next to the campfire". This was a fun one.

Guess what? game, where each child came up and described a camping picture shown to him and the others had to guess what it was.

Art & Craft

Camping scene photo frame with mixed media (tent opens to reveal photo).

Adventurers

Circle time: What noises can we make in the forest (sound sequencing)

Story time (Artic camping story from book, I think it's linguisytems)

Worksheets

working on individual sounds and sticking on camping scene

/s/ blends activity on pathway

Art & Craft

Creating camping scene, then sticking /s/ blends path on scene.

See, I told you it was fun.

Look out for our waterplay week coming soon!

A Camping we will go!

Hello Hello!

I know I have been away for a while. My twitter followers know that I have been promising to write a new blog post for months now, but life and procrastination have gotten in the way. Anyway the good news is that I'm here and IT'S SUMMER!!!!

This summer the Easy Speak clinic has been transformed into Camp Easyspeak, where groups come in for therapy from 9-11am and engage in activities around various themes each week. We have just completed our 3rd week of camp and I am EXHAUSTED having a great time. The children are definitely enjoying it and showing such great improvements in their speech and language skills, and parents are happy so I'm happy. I love group therapy, since the children really motivate each other and you see all these new personalities that you don't get to experience in a 45 min individual session.

I've really been brainstorming and using lots of different online resources to make activities fun and interesting and keep our campers engaged and happy. I'd really like to go into detail in a few more posts about what we've been doing during sessions and offering ideas for group therapy. This post, however, you may think of as a teaser, just a bit of an overview of our activities.

Camp is broken up into different groups, who come different days across the week.

• Monday: Explorers; 4 boys, ages 3-4yo with mild expressive and receptive language delay.
• Tuesday:Discoverers; 3 girls and 2 boys with severe delays. Diagnoses include low functioning ASD, Intellectual Disability, Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy and Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum.
• Wednesday: Busy Bees; 4 boys aged 2-4yo with moderate to severe receptive and expressive language delay, social skills deficits, and behavioural challenges. Diagnoses include "mild autism", PDD-NOS and new CI user.
• Thursday: Skill Builders ; 6 boys aged 5-7, all with suspected or diagnosed high functioning ASD.
• Friday: Adventurers; 3 boys and 2 girls with Phonological Disorders, some with suspected CAS.

Our theme has been the same across groups for each week.

Week 1: Camping theme

Week 2: Water

Week 3: Movement

and our theme for next week is going to be food.

It has been amazing to watch these children work together and interact so well with each other. This particularly with the discoverers who I was a bit hesitant to place together initially, but have created a wonderful group dynamic.

This is our first real " camp" experience at the Easy Speak Clinic and I anticipate bigger and better things to come in the future.