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.