Bridgeway Academy’s summer camp program kicked off this week and so did our Immersive AAC class. Our theme this week was LIGHT! Some of the favorite activities this week were:

• Putting finger lights in balloons to make them illuminate in the dark. We used this opportunity to work on single words “on,” “in,” “more,”  and “big” or phrases “turn it on,” “put it in” and “make it big” (depending on the child’s language level).  Once the balloons were blown up we were able to play “keep it up” and found the balloons lots of fun to shake!
• We also used finger lights to sing piggyback versions of This Little Light of Mine. A piggyback song is a song that puts new or modified lyrics to an existing melody. We sang the song everyday and each child got the opportunity to add to the lyrics “Shine it ‘on my ___'” by adding a body part.
• Some other popular activities centered around the use of a black light. Part of our mission for the summer was to include food exposure each week. This week we used the black light to illuminate coconut and oranges. We also used the light to make highlighter art glow.

• We had a blast with many other light-up toys that we found on Amazon.com like a light tunnel and laser tops. Again, great opportunities to work on phrases like “turn it on,” or single words like “go.”

• One of Bridgeway Academy’s fabulous OTs, Ashlee joined us this week and directed the kids in making a glow in the dark lightning bug craft.

• My partner-in-class, Sam and I got some funny looks this week walking around the school and it wasn’t for her glowing mouse ears. In addition to taking video, collecting and analyzing language activity monitoring data via Realize Language we needed to find a way to collect data in the moment. Our solution was to put strips of masking tape on our legs with mini sharpies on our lanyards.

• Overall, we feel like week one was a great success. Highlights were a student generating phrases on his device and then reading them verbally, a student using a 2-word phrase (“want play”) for the first time we’re aware of and another student learning to use the word “break” when he got overwhelmed. I think the week is wonderfully summed up by one student’s word cloud (from Realized Language):

Stay tuned… next week we will learn about flight and gravity!