Weeks 3 & 4 of our Engines at Play summer camp nurtured language, social, and emotional learning through the themes “animals” and “superheroes”. We’re having a blast and seeing progress every day. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Knowing what to expect helps our campers feel secure and available for learning. Our posted daily schedule includes pictures for our kiddos who aren’t readers yet.

Campers collaborated to create a farm mural.

Making slime helped our campers practice following directions, sequencing, asking for help, and taking turns. Afterwards, we had fun hiding toy animals in it.

Playing together with toy animals and other objects in sand was a fun sensory activity that also helped our campers practice vocabulary, conversation, and sharing.

Little bookworms! Story time offers endless opportunities for kids to build the foundational skills for narrative development. Among other skills, looking at books together helps our kiddos practice listening, vocabulary, sequencing and predicting.

Yoga continues to be a daily camp highlight (stay tuned for an article about Yoga at ICT). Last week our yoga teacher, SLP Jacki Ruben, included this gratitude activity to each day’s class: Adding something new to their gratitude hand every day not only highlighted what they value in their lives, but also helped them learn organizational and semantic skills through mind mapping strategies.

A therapist observed these campers shout: “Everyone, hands in!” This captures camp goals such as teamwork, following a group plan, using expected social behavior, and simply making friends, in action.

These superheroes and their friends practiced sharing and negotiating for materials, as well as following directions, to create superhero masks and cuffs.

Keep an eye out for our next camp update, as well as an article about the “Zones of Regulation”– a program developed by Leah Kuypers, OTR/L that we use daily at camp to teach the children how to regulate and express their emotions.