In the past few years, under an overall initiative called Talk2Thrive, Daniela O'Neill has increasingly engaged in more outreach in the community to help build strong foundations for language in children in fun and informal ways in peer-to-peer, family, school and community settings. Some of these intiatives have involved students she advises and/or students in her courses.
Follow this outreach on Talk2ThriveLab Instagram page
Exciting new grant received to expand our Board Game related activities in the community!
Daniela received a grant in 2022 from the Lyle S. Hallman Foundation to expand the lab's outreach with board games in the local community. You can read more about the program and the new grant in this article in UWaterloo News
To date, this new outreach has included curating a new board game collection for older 9- to 14-year-olds for Kitchener Public Library to complement the earlier board game collection for 2- to 8-year-olds; expanding Board Game Buddies to 10 local schools, and developing new board game collections for a variety of community organizations serving under-resourced families and children (e.g., food bank, women's shelter, refugee services).
Our Board Game Outreach Initiatives
Our initiatives have taken place in libraries, schools and community organizations. See each section for detailed information about how the board game collections were developed and the important criteria we took into account, what games are in the collections, and many more open-access materials.
- Libraries
- Working with Kitchener Public Library (KPL), two curated collections of board games were developed to foster language, literacy and social interaction skills and introduce families and children to the wide variety of new types of board games available.
- Young Children's Board Game Collection designed for 2 to 8 year-olds launched in 2021
- Older Children's Board Game Collection designed for 9 to 14+ year-olds launching in 2025
- Working with Kitchener Public Library (KPL), two curated collections of board games were developed to foster language, literacy and social interaction skills and introduce families and children to the wide variety of new types of board games available.
- Schools
- Working with teachers at a local elementary school, theBoard Game Buddies Drop-In Recess Program was first developed by Daniela O'Neill to provide early grade students, many of whom were learning English as a second language, with a fun opportunity to build their language skills in interaction with older students. Board Game Buddies usually takes place during one 20 minute recess time weekly in the school library. This program fosters so much language, social interaction, and laughter! It is amazing to see how much fun and learning can happen in 20 minutes and the children love it. This program has now been brought to 10 more WRDSB schools.
- Community Organizations
- We have now created curated board game collections working together with a variety of community organizations, many of whom are serving under-resourced families and children (e.g., Food Bank, Women's Shelter, Refugee Services, Community Centre). We have learned (and continue to learn!) a great deal as we work with these community organizations about what kinds of collections of board games work well and provide a lot of joy and fun for children and their families.
- Playful Learning City Spaces
- Drawing from research and initiatives all around the world, Daniela and undergraduate and graduate students in her courses have been reimagining how playground spaces within local City of Waterloo and City of Kitchener parks can afford richer playful learning and social communicative opportunities for young children and families. The range of settings and topics has also widened over time, to include the development of an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) Board for a public park playground (see below) and the design of a playful space on the UW Campus with undergraduates in mind. Students' presentations related to these playful learning projects are available to view in this section.
- One course and its student projects were highlighted in an article in the The Record July 25 2022 Reimagining playgrounds in Waterloo Region
- Playground AAC Board
- Working with a local landscape architect, Snow Larc, Daniela and her students designed an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) Board the City of Waterloo's Eby Farm Playground in Waterloo Park. This year-long project resulted in a design strongly influenced by existing research in relevant fields of AAC, child language development, and cognitive development. Our process and decisions in creating this AAC Playground board's vocabulary, organization, and symbols we used are documented in full in this openly available Report that also includes a full Appendix of openly available symbols.
- Museums
- Planet Word Museum, Washington, DC - grand opening September 2020
- Daniela O'Neill is on the Advisory Board of Planet Word and was a primary academic consultant for the First Words exhibit. You can see the First Words exhibit in this PBS Newshour video (June 9, 2022) at minute 1:09.
- Planet Word Museum, Washington, DC - grand opening September 2020
- Canadian Children's Literacy Foundation
- As of Dec. 2022, Daniela O'Neill has joined the Board of Directors at the Canadian Children's Literacy Foundation whose mission is to ensure all children in Canada are equipped with the literacy skills they need to reach their full potential. CCLF was founded in 2017 by Heather Reisman, founder and CEO of Indigo and Chair of the Indigo Love of Reading Foundation, and Heather Munroe-Blum, Chairperson of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.