by Wendy Deters, Executive Director
Dear Child’s Voice Community,
Child’s Voice is in full summer mode! Our school-aged students have been attending our Extended School Year (ESY) program which is filled with learning and fun. Our youngest learners are still seeing their at-home and group therapists too. Audiology is packed with students from surrounding districts who have some time to care for their hearing over the summer.
ESY has been super fun at Child’s Voice. The students have at least one field trip a week lined up. They have been visited by a reptile specialist, learned about dinosaurs, gone to the Kohl Children’s Museum, and had a picnic. Upcoming fun events are a water day, movie theater, baseball game, and musical performance.
Obviously they are super busy having fun, but we can’t overlook the fact that these special experiences are full of language and opportunities to listen and learn. Think about all of the different sounds you hear going on a bus or being outside at a baseball game. Field trips and family outings are chances to build core knowledge for learning and we like to take full advantage of these opportunities.
The best part about special experiences is that they provide a point of reference for reading. If we go to a baseball game the students learn new vocabulary words and then get to see them in action while they take in the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of the experience. The next time they listen to or read a book about a sport or game, this baseline knowledge will help them put together the pieces for understand and reading.
Local libraries always have fun summer reading programs to encourage learning when school is out. These are great ways to get help kids get to “1,000 books before Kindergarten,” which you can read more about here. Literacy is a huge part of all of our programs at Child’s Voice, so I am happy to have this opportunity to write about it here.
Enjoy the rest of the summer and keep taking all of those fun experiences to heart. I know we do here!
Best,
Wendy
Photo: We learned and talked about the wonders of water at the Kohl Children’s Museum.