Summer Postcards for Social and Language Skills

As the school year winds down, parents often ask me for easy summer activities to support goals we’ve been addressing all year. Some of my favorite tips involve postcards.

Dear Me

Writing a daily postcard each night of vacation builds sequencing skills (or grammar or vocab or any expressive language skill). I ask families to come up with three to four activities they did that day or three to four elements from a big event. Parents may take (verbatim) dictation, but I always ask that the child sign off. I often suggest doing this in a restaurant while waiting for food to arrive, because family meals are a typical time to discuss what happened that day.

If it's feasible, I ask parents to mail the postcard home each day. If not, they act as postmaster once home by mailing one a day.

This mail generates a lot of post-vacation excitement. The little one gets mail several days in a row and hears or reads activity sequences again. Kiddos love stories they star in! They are also a great keepsake and less arduous than keeping a travel journal.

I ask parents to bring the postcards in for a couple of sessions once school starts again. They give me and my students something tangible to review and I have a reference point for topics and questioning. They also provide a great starting point for class projects on “what I did on my summer vacation.” Our students appreciate the memory boost for generating detailed, sequential information about events that happened several weeks earlier.

Goal Nudging

I also use postcards to push goals along during the break from our sessions, which is especially important for fluency students.

My student and I come up with five to seven summer goals (with a variety of difficulty). Each goal gets written individually on a postcard (hometown or generic), stamped and addressed to me. As the student completes the goal, they simply sign their name and drop it in the mail. I encourage a sentence or two of feedback, particularly from older students, but I don’t insist. If I don’t receive a postcard within the first month or so of summer break, I send a postcard reminder of my own!

I use these activities with K-12 students, but I think they would adapt easily to adult populations as well.

Kimberly Swon Lewis, ME, CCC-SLP, is a pediatric speech-language pathologist in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the author of the ActivityTailor.com blog. [email protected]