THE CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PROGRAM (CAP)

Camp New Connections

Schedule-based activities

Each day, the children will begin with a check-in to discuss the daily schedule and an emotion card to help the children become accustomed to looking at facial expressions and body language on a regular basis. Children are taught to sequentially read facial expressions.

The children are briefly introduced to the concepts to work on for the day. The relevance of the week's concept is visually demonstrated to the children.

Concepts are taught in an interactive, activity-based manner. Once the core concept is taught, the children engage in a more interactive-based activity that incorporates the concept. During this time, the children will learn to generalize what they have learned.

Once a concept is taught, the following concepts and weeks will build upon them. For example, during the Body Language unit, awareness of the self and others in terms of personality and appearance will set a building block for teaching how our bodies give messages. Skills in self awareness and body language set the foundation for teaching the mechanics of conversation and social conversation.

Camp New Connections has a strong drama component as this provides a safe avenue for the children to practice their skills. Improvisational drama will also be used to help the children learn about differential responses and how to deal with them.

Sensory Integration (S/I) breaks will exists twice throughout each day. During each S/I break and check-out, the children will take time to review their progress.

At the end of the day, the children will have a settling-down activity and will discuss how they feel their day went. They will be encouraged to consider how they will apply what they learned to their immediate home environment (or whatever they are doing later that day) in an effort to foster generalization and to help them transition after camp.