Conquering COVID learning loss while having fun at camp! – Special needs camps autism and learning differences.
So many of the conversations that we have had lately with parents revolve around helping their child gain back confidence in social skills. The past year has been hard for all of our campers and their families, returning campers and new campers.
So how will a therapeutic camp program allow our campers to gain and feel confident in their social skills this summer?
Keeping COVID in mind, these are the three key reasons our social skills and speech therapy programs are so successful during the summer at Camp Lee Mar, and will be beneficial considering the inability to practice social skills in person over the past 16 months;
- We reinforce all speech and social skills in a naturalized setting across our camp environment. This means not only do our campers receive “classroom” speech sessions, but our speech specialists also see the campers across a range of activities in the camp program. Sometimes what a child is capable of in a therapy room looks very different in an outside social setting. Our counselors and speech specialists can reinforce and generalize needed social skills across all areas of camp life.
- We follow your child’s I.E.P. goals, but we can also add family goals too! The benefit of a residential camp speech program is that we get to see how your child copes and adjusts in all settings. We get to develop social skills needed for school and home.
- Camp offers a seven week, twenty-four hour a day immersive social and language skills program. Many of our campers make more social and emotional progress in the seven week camp program than they do during an academic year.
It is this functional approach that allows our campers to build their friendship circle at Camp Lee Mar. The speech staff and the counseling staff work closely together so every opportunity that arises during the day can be used as a natural social learning experience. The staff can guide our campers in their social interactions to allow them to be successful making friendships and to assist in learning the skills to maintain those friendships. That is how our campers gain such meaningful connections at Camp Lee Mar. We have parents tell us that their child has trouble remembering the names of the other students in their class at school, but after seven weeks at Camp Lee Mar their child can name all their friends and counselors from their cabin.
It is amazing to watch each cabin at camp become a close friendship circle, to see the campers develop a sense of pride in their group, and their role within the group, and to see how the staff assist in facilitating meaningful camper friendships and connections. This is what makes the Camp Lee Mar experience so special for our campers. Our campers feel the sense of belonging that comes with having friends that understand them, friends that include them, and friends that are working on similar skills as they are. To have a true friendship circle within their cabin helps our campers to work on social skills that will benefit them for the rest of their school year in a fun camp environment.
So when considering the potential loss of social and academic skills during COVID, what better way to help your child work on new skills than being at Camp Lee Mar!
Written by Lynsey Trohoske
My name is Lynsey Trohoske, I am the assistant director at Camp Lee Mar. I have three amazing children, my middle child happens to be on the autism spectrum and is a camper at Lee Mar. I joined camp as a counselor in 1998 and loved the campers and their families so much that Camp Lee Mar became my second home!