The Summer Day Camp at West Metro Learning Center has a long, successful history.  For many years, the camp offered social skills programming separate from therapeutic recreation activities and community outings.  We noticed many families enrolling in both and decided to combine them starting in 2025.  The current format includes social skills curriculum, therapeutic recreation activities and community outings almost every day.  This has simplified the enrollment process and helped the kids practice implementing their curriculum lessons consistently.

The primary objective of our Summer Day Camp is to increase social understanding and thinking, while also developing the social skills that enhance your kid’s ability to develop meaningful relationships and perform successfully and happily in their various life circumstances.  The program’s goal-directed therapeutic recreation uses a variety of environments and settings to promote use of social, emotional, communication and behavioral skills.

Activities are designed to:

·         Increase social understanding and develop social thinking

·         Build social skills and promote transfer and generalization of those skills

·         Increase social communication, interaction skills and friendship behaviors

·         Encourage socialization, peer interactions, cooperative group skills, and teamwork in a small group setting

·         Facilitate self-awareness, self-management, and self-expression

·         Increase overall independence and cognitive skills

Our Summer Day Camp has two different schedules.  Our Monday through Thursday schedule starts at 9:00 am.  The morning begins with kids in their classroom for a social skill instruction followed by some time for a therapeutic recreation activity.  This could be a craft, hands-on experiment, or maybe a short outing to a nearby park or library.  Following the activity, the kids have time to enjoy their lunch (provided by their family) in a quiet room or a room that has a movie or TV show playing. Lunch usually starts around 11:30 am-noon.  After lunch, we get ready for our community outing.  The afternoon starts with a review of the social story for our community outing before we leave, usually around 12:30 pm.  We return to West Metro Learning Center around 3:30 pm and help the kids get ready to be picked up at 4:00 pm.  Our Fridays start at 10:00 am and end at 4:00 pm.  There is no social skills instruction in the classroom or therapeutic recreation activity this day as it is reserved for community outings that have a longer duration. Kids should still bring their own lunch on Fridays or bring money to purchase their own lunch during the outing. 

The Summer Day Camp at West Metro Learning Center is 100% adaptive, specifically adapted for those with neurodivergent conditions, like Autism and other related conditions.  Our lead teacher is a special education teacher and they develop the lessons to ensure it is delivered in an age appropriate and easy to understand manner.  We maintain a staff to student ratio of 1:3 at all times.  This helps us respond to and redirect any disruption that may occur, but more importantly it helps our staff develop respect and trust with the kids.  If needed, we may be able to provide 1:1 support for an additional charge.  Each of our staff carry visuals to help communicate with the kids and our space has a dedicated quiet room, which the kids can ask to go in if they feel themselves becoming dysregulated.  We even adapt the seating arrangements in our vehicles daily so that everyone is comfortable and cooperative during the ride.  During the community outings, our staff are observing and prompting the kids towards goals like community etiquette, relevant reciprocal conversation, decision making to promote independence and responsibility, visual referencing and self-management in crowds.