Summer at Cajal Academy

Come learn about who you are, build new friendships and develop skills that will help you become who you want to be!

July 7-30, 2025; Morning, Afternoon & Full-day Options

Grades 1-12

Cajal Academy’s full-service summer program for bright, gifted and “twice exceptional” kids empowers students with tools they can use to better understand their own unique profiles and to learn tools they can use to foster truly inclusive neurodiverse communities, and to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for their needs. Like our year-round program, kids in our summer program will build social and executive function skills while collaborating with peers to solve real world problems through project-based learning—all with embedded support for OT, PT, SLP and social skill needs.

Now in our new location in the heart of South Norwalk, we’ll be building the confidence and communication skills our innovative kids need to thrive in the community while exploring our natural and urban environment and engaging with local businesses and the Maritime Aquarium, just one block away. Meanwhile, afternoon workshops in arts, fitness and more will give kids a chance to discover new interests, and provide opportunities to work with our expert licensed therapists.

New this year, families who have not previously enrolled at Cajal Academy for the academic year can add a Diagnostic Placement to your full day program, to receive a multi-disciplinary evaluation and treatment recommendations using our ground-breaking approach to understand and address student needs. Submit your application today!

Add-On Services and Specialized Summer Programs

Eligibility & Admissions

Cajal Academy programs are tailored to meet the needs of students who have strong analytical and/or creative thinking skills. Many of our students have sensory, executive function, learning, social-emotional, neurophysio or chronic medical conditions, including ADHD, ASD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, EDS, POTs, MCAS and more.

Cajal Academy has a new location in the heart of historic SONO: accessible by train to towns from New York City to Westchester to New Haven to Danbury, and just blocks from the Maritime Aquarium!

In November 2024, we relocated our school to an iconic, 100 year old building in the heart of South Norwalk: home to innovative startups, restaurants and boutiques, and home to the Norwalk waterfront, Aquarium and walking distance to several city parks. We will be exploring our new natural and urban environment, bringing fitness activities to our dedicated outdoor space (and then cooling off in our air conditioned interior!) and establishing an urban garden with our kids. Fieldwork trips this summer will explore many of the educational opportunities within walking distance of the school, including a boat trip to Sheffield Island to tour an historic lighthouse. As we teach the kids in ELA, sometimes the setting makes the plot—and we can’t wait for our first summer in our new home!

Our summer program brings together academic learning, social-emotional growth and the executive function skills that innovative thinkers need to realize their visions, through in-depth project-based learning. Find out more about the different options for how your child can participate in our summer program!

Full-Day Program

Transformation & Community through Self-Discovery & Real World Learning

9:00 am -2:30 pm

Come explore who you want to be, and develop the skills to grow towards it, in Cajal Academy’s summer Transformations program for bright, gifted and twice exceptional kids.

Kids who have innovative and unique ways of seeing the world need a unique set of skills to realize those visions, and to avoid becoming overwhelmed or isolated along the way. Helping kids gain the self-understandings and skills they need to do that is at the core of Cajal Academy’s mission throughout the academic year, and we are opening this up to the community through our Full Day Summer Program.

Our Full Day students get all the benefits and activities as the Morning and Afternoon programs, including project-based learning sessions and afternoon arts, fitness and recreational activities, and have the opportunity to work with our expert licensed therapists and our Growth Mindset and Agency coach to help them better understand their unique strengths and weaknesses, and how these profiles influence their learning and social-emotional experiences. Skill building is infused throughout the day to help them learn social skills they can use to foster truly inclusive neuro-diverse communities; sensory strategies they can use to optimize the brain for learning; and a design thinking/engineering process they can use to break down and manifest visions from a new novel to launching a new product.

Morning Program:

STEAM, Skill Building & Project-Based Learning

9:00 am -1:00 pm

Learn new academic, social, executive function and neurophysio skills in our morning session: a condensed version of Cajal Academy’s year round, neuroscience-based approach to learning and social-emotional development!

Spend your July with Cajal’s unique community, and experience a whole new way to learn! Our summer cohort will work together as a team to collaboratively solve a real world problem—one that requires them to integrate across math, science, social studies, language arts and visual arts curricula to develop the analysis, synthesis and creative thinking skills that are essential to 21st century success. All of this is supported through our exclusive Body-Informed Learning, which gets kids up and moving to accelerate their learning, instead of pressuring them to sit still and listen.

Our morning session is taught by Cajal Academy’s expert, year round team of educators and licensed OT, PT, SLP and psychology clinicians. Curriculum and supports to build executive function, social-emotional, self-regulation and physio skills are integrated into the project curriculum itself. Meanwhile, all our students receive instruction in the neuroscience behind learning and social development, fostering an authentic growth mindset, and coaching in how to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for their needs. High school students will take this one step further through leadership training and mentoring opportunities.

All students interested in joining our summer program must complete our regular admissions application; students who are enrolled in our current or upcoming school year are not required to submit an additional application.

Afternoon Program:

Arts, Fitness & Electives

12:30 - 2:30 pm

Discover new interests and build social skills

Every year, we hear how our families are trying to find new extracurricular activities, but their kids aren’t sure what they’d like—or are nervous about how well they’ll do. Our new afternoon program fills this need, by giving students the opportunity to trial a range of different activities (showcasing our staff’s amazing array of hidden talents) in a safe and nurturing environment that’s supported by our expert therapists. This will include sports fundamentals co-taught by our physical therapist to support students with differing neurophysio needs, as well as arts, nature and more. Families seeking to keep therapy services going through the summer can schedule 1:1 and small group sessions with our clinicians; please note that space is limited and priority will be given to families who are enrolled in our academic year program.

Find out more about our Optional, Therapy and Diagnostic Add-Ons for our Summer Program!

Meet our Therapists!

Cajal Academy therapists have both diagnostic and treatment experience in their fields. Click through to read their bios!

New for Summer, 2025, enroll your child with a Diagnostic “add on” to learn more about your child’s profile, how their learning and physio profiles relate to their social functioning at school and in the community, and how to solve common mysteries from “why do they hold it together all day at school and then explode when they get home” to “how come they always know just what to do — but then never seem to do it” and “how can I get my child to engage in non-preferred tasks?”

All Diagnostic Programs will follow Cajal Academy’s multi-disciplinary and research-backed approach to understanding children’s needs. We use the data in the child’s neuropsychological and neurophysiological profiles to get beyond labels like ADHD, ASD, dyspraxia, dyslexia and more to identify the specific neurocognitive and/or neurophysio skills that drive those challenges. We then work backwards down the neuro-developmental chain to identify missing or vulnerable links that undermine the child’s ability to robustly perform those tasks. This paradigm shift in how we identify the problem that a child needs our help to solve often reveals skills-based connections between seemingly disparate areas of academic, social and/or daily living tasks, and helps to explain emotional difficulties your child may be experiencing at home or at school.

At Cajal Academy, we use these insights as the basis for multi-disciplinary treatment programs that are proving successful at reducing or even removing students’ learning and in some cases social-emotional differences, by applying neuroplasticity to build up the neural networks that the child needs to identified skill through research-backed treatment plans that integrate traditional and Cajal-exclusive methods, with Growth Mindset and Agency coaching that helps the child apply these skills within the school environment. That process requires a longer course and thus those services are not included in our summer sessions.

For students enrolling with a Diagnostic Summer Session, we will provide the first part of this process: a multi-disciplinary assessment connecting the dots across your child’s profile by looking at how the data in their profiles relate to the academic, social and daily living tasks where they struggle. We will start with a full record review and analysis of the evaluations and assessments that you already have for your child, including any shifts or trends within their data where it has changed over time. We will then perform additional formal and informal assessments and observations examining areas that are in our experience commonly overlooked in this cohort of kids but that are necessary to connect the dots across the child’s profile, including physio, language and neuropsychological assessments. Please note that we will not be re-administering tests that have been recently performed, in order to avoid learned practice effects and to reduce the stress that many students experience with formalized testing. As such, we may not perform all of the tests that would customarily be included within a comprehensive multi-disciplinary evaluation, however we will incorporate the data from prior administrations into our assessment and review.

At the end of the Summer Program, we will provide you with a written summary of our findings, and will meet with you (and, if you like, your child’s school or community-based team) in conferences to be held July 31 and August 1 to explain our findings. We will also share with you at that time our recommendations for how we would approach your child’s profile here at Cajal to reduce or remove any learning or social-emotional barriers that have been identified to develop any vulnerable foundational skills that have been identified and successively re-integrate those skills into more sophisticated learning and social-emotional tasks using our research-backed methodology.

A Camp that Brings EDS Kids Together and Moves them Forward

How to Apply for Cajal Academy’s Summer Program

All students for our Summer Program must meet the admissions requirements applicable to our academic year program. Please start your application below.

Have questions? Contact us!

Our summer programs are fueled by the same transformative approaches we integrate into our academic school year. We empower students to access their strengths, foster truly inclusive neurodiverse communities and learn how to monitor and manage their sensory and physio needs—all while developing academic and executive function skills by working with peers to solve real world problems. This includes OT, PT, SLP, social skills development and counseling—all the services you’d expect to find in a special education setting, but integrated into a camp-like “summer school” setting for bright and gifted kids.

Using the same methodologies that we follow in our academic year program, we take down the “silos” between these fields and integrate social skill, executive function, motor coordination, fitness and communication skills directly into the academic and project-based learning. Use these links to find out more about our program and approach.