Taking a summer break? Our thoughts

We love to look at summer as an opportunity to ramp up learning in a fun way.  It's a great time to work on skills that our clients may not have had the time to focus on during the school year. When families are able to make therapy a priority and come 2-3x a week, we can see fast gains before returning to school. Increasing or maintaining therapy over the summer is important for our clients to continue building therapeutic rapport with our therapists and making gains in their individualized treatment plans. Having a consistent therapy schedule also helps our clients by offering a weekly routine during summer, a season which often has an increased amount of unstructured time. 

Summer months bring new opportunities for therapy! The warm weather allows for more outdoor fun. You might see our therapists outside working on sensory skills with water or grass, handwriting at an outdoor picnic table, or practicing outdoor skills like bike riding.

Summer also brings us summer groups! Finding groups that target handwriting, social skills, or reading is a fun way to practice skills and help kids reach their full potential before returning back to school. 

Many of our clients benefit from multiple services. We are able to offer multiple services under one roof! This allows our therapists to collaborate with one another and with our families, and create complimentary plans for therapy. More consistent and in depth treatment plans allows for increased progress! 

Here are our tips for summer:
1- ipad/device time should match reading/outdoor time.  This helps keep us parents honest about how much device time kids are really using.
2- plan ahead.  Chat with your therapists about your vacation and camp times.  Make sure to prioritize scheduling your OT and speech sessions to avoid summer roll back. Our therapists are happy to work with families to help reschedule missed sessions. 
3- have fun but keep some structure. Unstructured time can exacerbate some symptoms especially with ADHD and will make September a harder transition.  Maintain a routine as much as possible.
4- keep a list of summer "daily to dos".  Before kids get on the ipad or lounge in front of the TV, have a checklist of items they need to get done.  This can vary with age but here are some examples: Make bed, 20 minutes of reading, brush the dog, brush your teeth, pair socks from the laundry, help unload the dishwasher.  Making sure kids know they are part of the household and they have chores as well, is very important.