“It’s November! It’s almost Thanksgiving!!!!”
“AND PUMPKIN PIE?!?!?”
“Is it time for the special feast!?!?”
“This is my pilgrim hat!”

It’s TURKEY TIME! Thanksgiving is filled with family, friends, food and traditions. What do all these things have in common? Socialization! Thanksgiving Day and the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving provide us with wonderful natural language and social learning opportunities. We want to start helping you prepare your child for Thanksgiving now. The more familiar they are with Thanksgiving and the people that they will see, the more likely they will want to participate and interact with others on the actual day.

It’s almost time for school! That means your child will probably be in a new classroom, maybe even in a new school, have a new teacher and have new classmates……A LOT of changes! It can be very difficult for your child to be social with their new friends once a new school year has begun and as they are going through all these changes and new beginnings. As this new school year is approaching, we wanted to share a few fun ideas for you to help your child be social at school:
#1 Take Pictures

In addition to your coolers packed with snacks and drinks and bags with cuddy blankets, video games, DVD players and iPhones, bring along language learning and interactive activities to make the most out of your next road trip! So turn off the movie and Nintendo Ds and give your child what they want the most….you!

Summer Fun: Water Fun
Playing in the water in the summer can not only help your child beat the heat, but also work on their social and language skills! Water activities are also a way to help your child meet their sensory needs!
Here are a few fun and easy water activities:
Water Tables
Water tables are a great way to work on a variety of skills!
If your child is non-verbal, here are a few ideas:

Having a lemonade stand with your child will provide MANY great social language opportunities as well as other great skills such as sequencing skills, problem solving/planning/predicting, math, receptive and expressive language learning and more. It will also let your child be an active part of your community; get to know his/her neighbors and to have some summer fun!
Preparing your child for the lemonade sale:

Picnics are not only great for a little summer fun, but they also provide wonderful opportunities for language learning and socialization. Here are some ideas to help your child be successful with participating within a picnic, to learn wonderful functional language, to work on social skills and to have fun all at once!
Prepping your child for the picnic:

KidSpeak is taking a break from blogging to vacation with our families and to wrap up the rest of the spring semester! We will be back in June to start our summer blog project of providing a weekly language learning, summer-related activity that you can do with your child.

“I need to laugh, and when the sun is out
I've got something I can laugh about
I feel good, in a special way
I'm in love and it's a sunny day
Good day sunshine”
The Beatles couldn’t have said it any better. It’s spring and beautiful outside. Let’s take advantage of this feel-good time of the year by doing something so simple, yet so effective for our children……GOING ON WALKS!

Easter’s on it’s way!
Just a couple more days until Easter. The best tip we can give families when it comes to special occasions, special events, holidays and anything that your child will experience that it not ordinarily in their day to day routine is to PRACTICE! For example, an Easter egg hunt is not likely a part of your child’s daily, weekly or monthly routine so we need to MAKE IT A ROUTINE in order for your child to succeed during that family, community or church Easter egg hunt. How do we do this? PRACTICE!