Our class has recently been engaging in Google Hangouts, which is a communication platform including messaging, video chat, and SMS features.  The students have been able to enhance their communication and interaction skills by typing messages to each other.  This helps level the playing field among our students with many different communication needs. They are having a fun time coming up with topics and responding to each other.  We recommend using it across all appropriate levels, as it is a great communication tool.
 
-Paul Green, Young Adult Program Teacher, Celebrate the Children

We use the power of play to support emotional and social development.  Play integrated into lessons provides children a fun and engaging way for a meaningful understanding of concepts. Play is an extremely powerful vehicle to help students navigate emotional themes and challenges.  For example, our students became superheroes tackling being scared with the motto, “even superheroes get scared”.  We face our fears by teaching our “superpowers” of problem solving!  For each fear, we practiced how to work through the problem and how to cope with the feeling by using a superpower of coping skills like breathing, counting, etc. Next, we introduced our superpowers of “please and thank you” as we introduced the feeling of thankfulness. Our superheroes created thank you cards for our community helpers and for community based instruction, went to the police station to deliver their cards. Tapping into their Superhero Senses, mindfulness was also introduced on how to be present in the here and now using our senses. The children incorporated mindfulness by engaging in a mindful scavenger walk. Our CTC superheroes are just one example of how play engages our children and helps each student to integrate the social and emotional lessons into their repertoire. 

-Celebrate the Children