Grandview Kids
Every Child And Youth Living Life At Their Full Potential
It may become a little tricky when trying to explain to your child how their visit at Grandview may look a little different.
To make this process simple for all, we have provided a very simple booklet (below) showcasing the steps you and your child will take when coming in for your appointment at Grandview (complete with pictures)!
Written by Grandview Kids Recreation Therapist, Maddy
The warmer weather is finally here! Maddy has created some activity suggestions that you can do outside as a family. These activities will provide an opportunity for your family to get out and enjoy the warm weather while being active, creative, and, most importantly, having FUN together!
Instead of staying inside to watch a movie – design your own outdoor movie theatre! You will need a place to sit, pillows and blankets to keep comfortable, an extension cord, and a T.V. or laptop. If you have a projector and a white sheet you could make a big movie screen.
To make this event more exciting – decorate seats/chairs as cars using cardboard and craft supplies. You can make your very own drive-in movie theatre in your backyard. Pick a Disney movie or a family favourite to watch with popcorn, chips, and candy snacks.
With pools and water parks unavailable – try turning your backyard into a splash park! Some items to add could be a hose, sprinklers, small blow-up pools, buckets of water, water balloons, and sponges. Have the kids jump through the sprinkler, play duck-duck-goose with wet sponges, or dip their toes in the pool. Use slip and slides and water toys if you have those to add some extra fun!
To make lunchtime more exciting – take it outside! You will need a basket/cooler to hold food/drinks, plates/utensils/napkins, a garbage bag, and your choice of lunch and snacks. Simple lunch foods and snacks to take outside for your picnic include sandwiches, water bottles/juice boxes, cut-up fruits and vegetables, and chips. Get creative and try different foods while going on your backyard picnic!
A fun activity that can be played indoors or outdoors is building forts! Use items that can be found around the house/backyard such as chairs, blankets, pillows, cushions, tables and other items to make your fort. Add fairy lights to make your fort even more magical!
Ahoy Mateys! Pretend you are pirates on the hunt for treasure! Before starting, set up clues ahead of time that lead you to the ‘treasure’. To start, give your children a clue that will lead them to the next clue. For example, “Go to the place that keeps your food cold”. The children will then go to the fridge/freezer to find the next clue and so on. The last clue will then lead them to their treasure (toy, snack, fun prize, etc.). You can do this inside of your home or outside. For extra fun have your children dress up as pirates/explorers and make the treasure hunts themed!
Want to make walks or hikes more engaging for your children? Have them take a notebook and pencil to write down every animal you see in your neighbourhood. Your children can be zoologists and see how many animals they can find. Look for dogs, birds, squirrels, bunnies, etc. To add extra fun – bring binoculars, crayons to draw the animals, magnifying glasses, etc.
Pretend you are your favourite animals while doing some exercises and stretches outside! This is a great activity for all ages as you can modify the difficulty of the yoga poses based on ability. Some yoga poses to try can be dog, cat, butterfly, flamingo, snake, frog, etc. Get creative and have your children choose what animals to do!
There are a lot of fun outdoor sports and activities to play while enjoying the summer sun! Games such as Bocce Ball, Frisbee, Corn Hole, Horse Shoes and Ladder Ball are great family games to play outside. Some other activities that can be done outside are obstacle courses, chalk, bike rides, soccer, volleyball, basketball, baseball, road hockey, and many other sports! Work on increasing your skills while getting some exercise outdoors!
Children love to learn and say big words like dinosaur, helicopter and Mandalorian! Sometimes it’s hard for them to wrap their mouths around the sounds and syllables in these new and motivating words.
Try breaking these big words into smaller pieces or syllables. You can talk in slow motion to mark each syllable in the word (e.g. di-no-sour). Think of each syllable as a beat. Clapping out the beats with your hands or drumming the beats on the table are natural ways to emphasize the segments.
Try these playful ideas:
· Lego bricks can be visual props that demonstrate how a big word can be broken into smaller pieces. Each block represents a syllable. As you slowly say a syllable, pull a brick out of the bucket. Snap the bricks together to make a word, then break it apart again.
· Make playdoh snakes and use a plastic knife to cut apart a long word into smaller chunks. For example, a word like ‘helicopter’ would make 4 little playdoh chunks.
· Many fruits (e.g. watermelon, banana) and vegetables (cucumber) have 2 or more syllables. Cut out pictures from grocery store flyers. Then snip the picture into the same number of syllable pieces like a little puzzle. For example, a picture of a cucumber would be cut into 3 puzzle pieces because it has 3 syllables.
· From a bowl of fish crackers, remove one fish for every syllable you say. How many fish did you get?
· Play a guessing game by having your child guess the big word that you are saying in slow motion e.g. Can you guess this big word, all-i-ga-tor?.
· Books are a great place to highlight BIG words. Check out Never Ever Shout in a Zoo by Karma Wilson.
Written by Kelly
Speech-Language Therapy Assistant
While the doors of Grandview Children’s Centre were closed in mid-March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the work to support and care for Grandview kids and their families did not stop.
#TeamGrandview has worked tirelessly, around the clock to retool their practices and therapies to ensure children and youth were able to receive the care they needed and continue working on the goals they are working hard to achieve, albeit in a completely different and new way.
Prior to COVID-19, the heart of Grandview Kids could often be seen and heard in the halls of the Centre; with smiles and laughter booming from wall-to-wall. Over the last 12 weeks, that heart kept beating; as close to 200 clinicians were set up at home with the technology required to deliver services virtually.
Grandview’s team of Physicians even reconfigured their usual methods to partner with the Vanderbilt Institute out of Tennessee, U.S.A. to receive training on how to virtually diagnose Autism Spectrum Disorder, making Grandview Children’s Centre one of the leaders in Ontario, along with Holland Bloorview Children’s Hospital to be using this intervention.
“It has been well-received by families who’ve been waiting long periods of time to get a diagnosis for their children,” explained Grandview Kids CEO, Lorraine Sunstrum-Mann.
“We are ramping up each week. Families are getting more comfortable, clinicians are getting more comfortable and so we are seeing these virtual telepractice activities increase.”
Grandview Kids CEO, Lorraine Sunstrum-Mann
In addition, Grandview has also provided critical in-person appointments at its main Oshawa headquarters. The team developed a prioritised ranking to determine which children would come into the centre to receive therapy in-person. Up until this time it has been only a very select group of children who predominantly have had an increase or an exacerbation of pain or loss of function. These children and youth have been coming in for an intervention at the Botox clinic.
“Staff used recommended PPE and took all the necessary precautions to be able to support those kids,” said Sunstrum-Mann.
Schedulers are reaching out to families with children and youth with urgent needs to book therapy appointments at Grandview’s main headquarters.
The increase in in-person therapy has caused Grandview to have to retool the organisation once again, reconsidering almost every aspect of how the team delivers services.
“Working with children and the work we do is very high contact,” explained Sunstrum-Mann. “We have to think from a health and safety lens first and foremost so we have redesigned almost every process at Grandview.”
Children under 2 years old, people with breathing difficulties and those unable to remove a face mask on their own are not recommended to wear a mask or face covering.
“This can be tricky. Many kids at Grandview might struggle to wear a mask because of sensory challenges or other concerns and so our staff in that case would not require the child to mask but staff themselves would increase their level of PPE so in addition to a mask they would don a face shield for example.”
“Just like we’ve been seeing a very select children in-person all during COVID, the ranking will increase the number of kids based on urgent requirement to come in and see a therapist.”
This new priority ranking system is part of Phase 1 of Grandview’s reopening. This is expected to continue over the summer, gradually increasing to more groups of children as required based on their need and Grandview’s ability to maintain safety.
“There won’t be hundreds of kids next week but we plan to start gradually increasing the number of appointments over the month of June and then into the summer,” said Sunstrum-Mann. “This means for some families they’ll continue with virtual services until September and for other families, depending on the need of the child and the kind of intervention required, that they will be given an option of returning to the Centre for that in-person care.”
Sunstrum-Mann acknowledges for some families neither of those options will work and so a break in therapy may be what’s best, with plans to resume in September or whenever is best for the family.
Things look different at Grandview Kids; from health screen checkpoints at the entrance to clinicians decked out in Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), a number of changes have been made to the daily processes and protocols at the Centre in order to ensure the safety of families, staff and volunteers as in-person therapy appointments resume.
PPE is used to reduce exposure and prevent transmission by droplet or contact with another person. Examples of PPE barriers include gloves, gowns, facial protection and/or eye protection including safety glasses, goggles or face shields.
Masks are required when entering Grandview Children’s Centre. All staff, volunteers, and parents will be asked to wear a mask throughout the duration of their time at the Centre. Kids under 2 years of age are not recommended to wear a mask. Children and youth with breathing difficulties and those unable to take off the mask on their own are also not recommended to be masked. Families will be provided masks upon entering the centre and do not need to bring their own from home.
When arriving at Grandview Kids, you will be met by a screener/greeter at a checkpoint at the main entrance to the parking lot at the Oshawa Grandview Kids site. You will be asked to complete the health screen (see below) and if you and your child pass, you will be asked to park your vehicle and await a call from a Grandview Kids staff member to invite you inside. Upon walking in the main doors you’ll see a table set up with another screener/greeter waiting. This person will ask you to perform hand hygiene and put on a mask. They will also ensure that you passed the health screen.
The main waiting room has been eliminated. This is now a place for Grandview Kids staff to pick up the PPE they require for their appointments. If you are driving your child to their appointment, you will be asked to wait in your vehicle until your clinician is ready for your appointment. If you are arriving by walking or by public transit, a screener/greeter will bring you to a private waiting space until your clinician is ready.
Meet 2-year-old Grandview kid, Matteo! He is a smiley kid who loves animals (especially elephants), reading books and singing –– in particular, his favourite, Wheels on the Bus.
Matteo has Spina Bifida (L5-S5), and when his mother Michelle was 24 weeks pregnant, she underwent fetal surgery to repair the lesion at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. This was the ninth surgery of this kind to take place in Canada. Thanks to this surgery Matteo is thriving, but he does have some challenges with mobility. He still primarily crawls to get around, his parents Michelle and Victor detail, but he also has a walker to use for when he feels like it.
Matteo’s journey at Grandview Kids started when he was a year old, with Grandview Kids Physiotherapist Kate, where he began his physiotherapy treatment. His mother Michelle states, “he was developmentally behind in gross motor [skills,] which is to be expected in a child with Spina Bifida. The first thing she worked on was teaching him how to transition from sitting to lying down (and vice versa). Once he figured this out, his whole world changed! The small act of independence was a game-changer.”
Matteo is described as a cautious kid by nature by his parents, but that has not stopped him from pushing his boundaries and achieving massive goals by any means. In February, at 21 months old, he took his first independent steps with Kate! His parents did not think that he was ready for it at the time.
His parents describe the moment as very emotional, describing that at the time of his diagnosis they assumed that their baby would not ever be able to walk, “that was what we thought Spina Bifida meant. But with the help of Kate and Grandview Kids, and other support organizations, like Spina Bifida Families of Canada, we have learned so much more about Spina Bifida and that Matteo’s future is one of endless possibilities.”
Despite the COVID-19 Pandemic hitting pause on in-facility meetings, it has certainly not rested Matteo’s progress. He still gets excited to see and play with Kate through their Zoom appointments and learn something new. “I think he really likes showing off for her…his face lit up when he saw her and I had to stop him from grabbing the computer”, Michelle says.
His parents describe Grandview Kids as “a place that helps kids who need some extra help reach their full potential in a supportive and inclusive environment.” Matteo is making tremendous strides in his progress and he is always learning and growing. Seeing his progress is inspiring.
What’s next? His parents say, “With Kate’s help, we are well on our way to reaching our goal of getting Matteo to walk independently – which has been a dream of ours since his diagnosis.” We cannot wait to continue following your story, Matteo!
