Speech at the Beach!
With the school year in full swing, we want to take a minute to look back on the fun we had this summer at Steel City Speech’s first summer group sessions: Speech at the Beach!
Our hope for offering Speech at the Beach was to provide group sessions in a fun and encouraging setting. Our participants not only got to meet same-aged peers working on similar speech goals, but also participated in engaging articulation activities. The children heightened their awareness of their speech errors and improved their overall communication skills.
We met twice weekly for three weeks in July at a local elementary school. Each week had it’s own beach-related themed activities. Here were some of our favorite activities from this past summer!
Kinetic Sand Sound Dig
Kinetic sand is always a hit as an exciting sensory activity, but add beach toys like shovels, buckets, and ocean animals and you have endless fun! We buried articulation picture cards into the kinetic sand to target articulation practice. The children were able to dig out their speech sounds, say the word, and share the picture with their partner for carry over practice.
2. Jellyfish Dot Craft
Our younger participants loved using paint dot markers to create an ocean-themed craft. The bonus was that it served as a cute visual to take home for home practice of their speech sounds! Each child crafted their own jellyfish while saying each target word before coloring it with a paint dot pen.
3. Ocean Slime
What child doesn’t love slime? We catered our slime to our beach theme by coloring it blue and hiding plastic sea animal figures in it. We practiced using speech sounds while naming the ingredients and describing the steps in making the slime. Once the slime was made, they practiced using their speech sounds to name the animals they found “hiding” in the slime.
We had so much fun this past summer and are already planning for Speech at the Beach Summer 2023. If you are interested in gaining more information, or having your child participate in the group sessions this summer, please contact Cady Karras at cady.karras@steelcityspeech.com.
She is currently gathering information from interested families in order to best prepare. We design the classes for same-aged peers who are working on similar speech and language goals. We will decide on the age-group and group type (ex. Articulation, language, fluency, etc.) based on interest, so reach out to Cady Karras today!
We hope to see you at next summer’s Speech at the Beach!