If there's one word that comes to mind when summing up the most recent speech season, it's resilience. Committing to outdoor speech therapy for an entire winter season takes a lot of resilience from the kids, their parents - and their SLP! When winter weather is your therapy co-facilitator, you absolutely need to be flexible and roll with the changes it brings.

This season, we dealt with snow days, holidays, illnesses, sub-zero temperatures, and even high winds causing park closures. One morning I even broke the door handle off of the bus because it was frozen solid (shout out to Dave's Auto for fixing it up the same day!!). 😅 Not to mention, on the days where we actually had speech as scheduled, it was still REALLY COLD! Honestly, there were several mornings when I questioned my resilience to the cold as I piled on layer after layer of clothing.

But, I have to say, the kids that come to speech on The Magic Speech Bus are some of the coolest and most resilient kids I know! Seeing them show up week after week in their winter gear, bundled up to their noses, ready to hone their communication skills in the freezing cold made me toughen right up, too. We braved the winter challenges while learning new speech and language skills - and it ended up being even more fun than I initially thought it'd be!

So, what did we actually do this winter in speech therapy? We targeted so many communication skills, such as:

• Executive functioning: planning and building snowmen, deciding what to wear based on the weather, expressing emotions during the holidays (kids can get stressed around this time, too!)
  

• Receptive language: predicting weather patterns, matching snowflakes/leaves/rocks based on size/shape/color, reading winter stories
  

• Expressive language: using winter vocabulary, writing/dictating nature journals, telling stories, describing nature items (with our Observation Station chart from Outdoorsy SLP!)
  

• Articulation: so many repetitive movement games can incorporate articulation practice! Sledding, ice skating, throwing snowballs, making tracks... we came up with tons of words containing our speech sounds each week!
  

• Early language development: hiding toys in the snow to dig out and label, looking for winter animals & making animal sounds, sledding to elicit core vocabulary (push, stop, go, up, down, again)

For all of our fun outdoor activities, we spent plenty of time inside the bus, too! To keep us all warm and regulated, we often split our sessions between the bus and the park. Many books were read on the bus this winter, including:

• The Mitten

• The Gingerbread Man Loose In The School

• Bear Snores On

• Go To Sleep, Groundhog!

• Slug In Love

• The Rainbow Snail

• Fox Explores The Night

• Over And Under The Snow

• Snowmen At Night

I also have to give a special shoutout to the board game Sneaky Snacky Squirrel Game. For such a simple game, it kept kids of all ages engaged on days when it was just too cold to spend much time outside. One of the kids liked this game so much, she asked to make her own version of it with materials found in the park! (Thanks, Mom, for trusting your daughter's SLP with a handsaw!) She listed all the materials she'd need, gathered acorns, cut tree branches to size, painted them, designed a spinner, and wrote down the rules of the game. So many opportunities for language growth in one activity!

This winter season taught me that, with the proper clothes and proper attitude, nature-based speech therapy can be fun and effective all year round. I'm so proud of my speech kids who pushed themselves out of their comfort zones this season. In a lot of ways, they were the ones teaching me - how to focus on the fun, find joy in the cold, dark days, and how to just keep showing up when you'd rather hibernate under a blanket for three months. These kids are truly resilient!

As this season comes to a close, I can't pretend I'm not excited for warmer, brighter days ahead. I'm sure March will still be cold and windy (especially at Limerick Park - which for some reason is windy literally all year round), but my speech kids have proven to me they're a tough bunch. We can handle whatever the weather throws our way! All the while, we'll continue to work on our speech and language skills so we can become driven, confident communicators!

~Kristin Park, MS SLP

My mission is to help your child meet their fullest communication potential while enjoying the journey there. If you think we’d make a great team, send me a message and let’s connect today!

PS - This song's been stuck in my head all week, as we near the end of winter! 😊