The Chasing Hazel Foundation, with Evolve Speech Therapy, offers a group to aid children with Down syndrome in areas of communication, social interaction, and speech/language development. Parents will be involved in the planning on an individual basis and given some tools and activities to practice in their daily routine.
**In response to COVID 19 we have made all these sessions virtual through the Zoom platform.
 
VIRTUAL GROUP - Goals for communication
In addition to general social communication goals, in order to successfully communicate with the world around you, you need to be able to use your social language in all environments. During this group we are going to work on applying our social language to facilitate long lasting school and life skills. 

Virtual Communication Skills/online Skills: The group will practice communication in an online format. Skills such as prepping their work station (no distractions, good lighting, testing their microphone/camera) logging in and using zoom as a virtual platform. All social skills will be applied and practiced in this virtual setting.

Executive Functioning Skills: Is the ability to integrate a present awareness with future anticipation and past experiences to develop a reasonable goal & plan for the present action (all while still accounting for and flexibly managing the space, time and people around you). We will work towards improving executive functioning skills for task planning & execution.

Conversation skills:  The group will focus on key concepts required to be a successful participant in a conversation. Body in the group, eyes in the group, brain in the group, turn taking, topic maintenance, initiating and responding, and making appropriate comments.

Friendship and Interaction Skills: Friendships are formed through conversations, seeking things in common with peers (requires perspective taking), showing interest in peer’s experiences and thoughts, and creating shared experiences and memories with a peer. The group works towards building friendships, keeping friend files to store important information on friends, people we know and how to use what we know to improve how we interact with friends, where we go together & what we talk about when we hang out.

Perspective Taking Skills: The group will work on how to demonstrate empathy and sensitivity in friendships, interpret and react to non-verbal cues, predict other people’s reactions to one’s own social behaviors, and increase self-awareness of interaction skills.

Emotion Awareness and Management: The group will work on receptive comprehension of non-verbal communication cues in facial expression, body language, personal space, and tone of voice. This also refers to comprehension of emotion categories, emotional vocabulary, and gradations of emotions.



***Please note that age groups may vary

To register please fill out the following form: