Lear Communication

Exciting news!

We have a highly skilled Speech-Language Pathologist/Clinical Manager who is now located in the Peterborough/Cobourg/Port Hope area and has availability for new referrals. She can offer in-person services and/or virtual. This SLP has been working with cognitive communication impairments (MVA, stroke) at Lear Communication for many years. She’s also highly skilled with our neurodivergent populations including autism, ADHD, and school-aged kids who need support with executive functions. She’s been involved in our outpatient swallowing clinic, acute hospital contracts, and school-based rehabilitation.

If you’d like to work with us in these new service areas, please reach out!

NATIONAL TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION DAY

🟠The day honours the lost children and Survivors of residential schools, their families and communities. Public commemoration of the tragic and painful history and ongoing impacts of residential schools is a vital component of the reconciliation process.

🟠The creation of this federal statutory holiday was through legislative amendments made by Parliament. On June 3, 2021, Bill C-5, An Act to amend the Bills of Exchange Act, the Interpretation Act and the Canada Labour Code (National Day for Truth and Reconciliation) received Royal Assent.

🟠Orange Shirt Day is an Indigenous-led grassroots commemorative day that honours the children who survived residential schools and remembers those who did not. This day relates to the experience of Phyllis Webstad, a Northern Secwepemc (Shuswap) from the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation, on her first day of school, where she arrived dressed in a new orange shirt, which was taken from her. It is now a symbol of the stripping away of culture, freedom and self-esteem experienced by Indigenous children over generations.

“You mean to tell me that you want me to say the word backwards to my kid?” 🤯

HUH⁉️🤔

Yes, that’s right‼️

🍝 When we are modeling multi-syllable words (i.e., spaghetti) and the child is unable to sequence the syllables together after you (i.e., spa-ghe-tti), try modeling the syllables in reverse order. When modeling like this, children are often able to sequence the syllables together with higher accuracy. We model each syllable starting at the end and add on the proceeding syllable as modeled in this post!

Go a head, give it a try and see if it helps! ♥️

🚨 NEWS ALERT !! 🚨

👏🏼 Two of our new clinicians, Sara and Yazel, just finished their Clinical Master’s degree at Western University. In their studies, they pursued research in using group therapy to improve language outcomes in adults with acquired brain injury. This research was selected to be presented at this year’s American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA)’s 2024 Convention as part of its virtual program! Through critical appraisal of various studies, best practice guidelines, and systematic reviews, their research concluded that group therapy is beneficial in rehabilitation. It best supports community reintegration after an injury, it results in increased goal attainment, and patients report a more positive experience.

They are so excited to share this research with speech colleagues in North America, and to learn more from the research of others as well!

Way to go Sara and Yazel!! 🎉

☀️Let’s recap our last week of literacy camp!

🏕️On August 12 – 16 we hosted our final literacy camp of the summer, targeted for students entering grades 2-4! With fun filled theme days, team building and some wacky activities, these kiddos not only had a blast, but also exceled in their reading and writing skills!

🤪Our camp offers a unique group format for students to improve their literacy skills. This past camp, we focused on decoding strategies such as understanding syllable types, morphology (suffixes) and descriptive language. The camp is designed to emerge the students in a literacy rich environment through fun, sensory and team building activities!

🎉Let’s talk about some of the highlights from each day!

🍃 Monday: nature day—the students were on a scavenger hunt to find various nature items that followed closed syllable rules such as CK (i.e., rock), DGE (i.e., hedge), TCH and FLOSS (i.e., grass).
🦕 Tuesday: dino day – the students discovered various dinosaurs and created fossils to match their footprints while learning how to decode each dinosaur name through syllable division strategies such as VC/CV
💦 Wednesday: water day – the students were placed in two teams and participated in a water race relay to fill their buckets and retrieve their bossy R related sentence, decode it and read it out loud correctly to win the race!
🏅Thursday day: Olympic day – the students “skated” across the room on paper plates to find their magic E Olympic related words!
🦸 Friday: superhero day – the students competed in two teams to crawl through Spiderman’s web to grab codes to put together (read sentences loaded with suffixes -s/-ing/-ed) and find their superhero prize (popsicles)!

We can’t wait for next summer already!🎉