Hello everyone! It’s summertime, and everyone has been reaching out to ask us, “What is Cutting Edge doing for the summer?”
Or more to the point, “What is Cutting Edge doing for the summer that is safe and Covid-19 free?”
Of course, we had many plans for the summer, plans that we had in place before March. Now we’re busy adapting everything to make it safe for our new normal!
Kindergarten Readiness
One brand-new program we are launching is Kindergarten Readiness. This will apply to OT and speech issues, and even PT as necessary. We were thinking about not having this program this year, because of COVID-19. However, we realized that with school being out, this is a really critical program for us to be able to offer to your family. This will help you make sure your child has the social skills, language skills, and fine motor skills needed to start school. We’ll cover things like how to sit in a group, or how to carry a cafeteria tray—all those kinds of things!
This is aimed at those kiddos who are fairly typical in their development, but are slow in a skill or two—maybe they’re not quite holding their pencil right, or maybe they need help on some of the social pragmatics. This program is to fill in the gaps for your child and get them ready with the skills they’ll need for school. And since we don’t yet really know what kindergarten will look like in the fall, it’s especially important for your children to have their skills ready.
We will be doing 6 sessions. Your child will be in a group but we will have the kids distance as much as possible while working on whatever skills your child needs to be ready for kindergarten.
We are so excited about this! We’ve seen other clinics in other states have great success with this program. We have a flyer about the program in our office, and you’ll find information on our social media as well. The spots are limited. Part of making these programs happen with social distancing in place means that we have to have a much smaller group in a larger space. We also have quite a few volunteers who are helping us out with this to make it happen safely.
AAC
We really wanted to run AAC (augmented and alternative communication) camps this summer, but we know that it is difficult for many of our AAC users to socially distance. Instead, we are going to be scheduling our EDGE parent support group with a kickoff regarding AAC. We will have presentations all about your child’s use of AAC, whether your child already has a device in place or you’re just getting started on this journey. We will help you learn more about the process and offer you some tips and strategies. After that, we are really hoping to put together some parent support groups! These groups will give you both support and some AAC training. We expect these meetings to run for about an hour.
We will be hosting the EDGE support group virtually, and the parent support groups will be virtual as well. This will allow you to feel safe and comfortable in participating from home, but it will also allow us to give you individualized strategies for your child. Be on the lookout for more information!
The EDGE meeting is part of our nonprofit. If we do find that families need additional support there will be a small cost, because our clinicians are volunteering their time to meet with you and get you the support that you need. But if you are at home with a device that you really don’t know how to work with, and it is your child’s only way to speak—we want to get you the help you need to use it and use it well!
And finally … drumroll … we are doing two summer camps!
Summer Camps
Make sure you call us to get in on these because our groups are much smaller than usual. We will be doing our fine motor camp, and our OT/ST camp. We will probably use an entire gym space to make these happen and spread everyone out across the room, to keep them safe! We are still hoping to have our little miniature horses and dogs come over to our camp for painting and fine motor work.
The camps will run Tuesdays through Fridays in July. We have our students preparing them right now!
We want to make these camps very safe, so remember, that means very limited spots, and they’re already filling! So call our front desk and get yourself set up for camp as soon as you can!
