Camp Champ - Day 1

Peanut rocked his first day at Apraxia camp.  If I had any doubts that were doing the right thing by sending him to this camp, they are gone.  He transitioned from me to his clinician easily which was facilitated by the 5 or 6 skype sessions he has had over the last few months.  They were so prepared for us.  We walked through the doors and the organizer of the camp immediately greeted him by name.  HIM, not me!  He started the day with small group and he was quiet and asked for his chewy a lot at the start.  I was nervous for him as I was observing and was hoping that he would come out of his shell.  He would talk quietly to his clinician but didn't really engage in the group.  Then he had individual therapy.  I won't lie.  I cried.  She worked on the functional phrase "Can I have..." and he has always motor planned "Please me can have some...." all said very quickly and somewhat unintelligibly.  When I heard him say "Can I have the purple fish?" It was precise, slow and perfect.  Then she worked on s cluster and when she reminded him by making him watch her mouth and giving him a tactile cue he would get it.  BUT it transferred to home without prompting.  This afternoon he was playing a speech game on the ipad and he was making something spin and he says "spin" with the "s" and then turns almost surprised with himself and said "Mama, you hear me?  You very proud me?  I say ssssspin!"  They did an obstacle course in the large group and he didn't want to do it.  That doesn't surprise me at all.  He is the youngest kid at the camp and there are some kids that are 8 and 9 so I am sure he was just overwhelmed by it.  Overall, he had a blast, learned a lot and said he can't wait for more camp.  I couldn't have asked for more.


This is the email that I got from his clinician this afternoon:
I think Logan did a really great job today--he is such a hard worker! I'm very impressed with his ability to be flexible and participate in all of the activities.

Small group and large group were a bit more challenging than individual, probably because there was so much going on at once. We're splitting up the large group tomorrow so hopefully that will help him feel a little less overwhelmed. There were no tears or anything, but I could tell he was getting tired and overwhelmed when he didn't say much and got quiet. It seems that he feels more comfortable getting energy out during individual therapy, so I'll continue planning active tasks for the rest of the week.

As far as speech goes, I think he did well overall. He was able to produce p, b, and m most of the time in word-initial position. He was also able to produce s clusters (in 'stop, snack, swim') with support, which are pretty hard sounds to say. There were times when Logan was speaking very fast and I could only understand a small portion of what he was saying, but he seemed to either try to self-correct or choose another word/phrase. While this can be a helpful strategy for him, I'd like to try and help him say what he was originally planning to say by slowing the rate down & breaking it up into small sections .