One Week Down...

I don't know about other SLPs who have returned to work but y'all, I am suffering from what I like to call End of Summer Depression (ESD for short).  This first week back has struggle central in the speech room, mainly because the first week back is full of paperwork, scheduling, and PD presentations that don't apply to speech A.K.A my least favorite aspects of being a school based SLP.  I know that when my kiddos return on Monday I will be singing a different tune but this week almost did me in.  My room is finally starting to look like a room again and the first draft of my weekly schedule is slowly coming together.  I will say that it is 10,000 times easier this time around compared to my first year, where the name of the game was just keeping my head above water.  And now without further adieu here is a photo tour of speech room

Just like I left it in May

Attempting to make the room look less jail cell-esque 

Games, Activities, and Artic Cards

Under the calendar are our theme of the week, speech rules, and no way words posters

This blank wall will house our projects and artwork from the week's theme (please excuse the disaster that my desk is already becoming)

I have finally found a way to store my TpT creations/downloads! These crates are from Walmart but I have seen similar ones at Target in their back to school section.

This year I am making sure my kiddos know what they are working towards each time they come into the speech room.  I made 6 of these cards that each kiddo will fill out before we start our session.

And there you have it folks!  It's small and claustrophobic but it's all mine.  I am excited to see my speech babies this week and learn all about their fun filled summers using this Summer Synopsis packet.  

To those SLPs who have returned, welcome back and to those of you who are still enjoying summer... enjoy it while it lasts.

It's That Time Again

It's hard to believe the summer is quickly coming to an end (teachers in our district head back on MONDAY!).  It seem like just yesterday I was packing up and cleaning my speech room for the summer.  This summer has been a blessing with many adventures and visitors but I am ready to get back to my speech room and see my kiddos.  I am feeling 10,000 times more prepared for this year than I did last year, it's amazing what one learns in one year as a school based SLP.  I have been slowly organizing the materials I have at home, developing some new classroom management tools, and creating some fun new ice breaking activities to get my kids back in speech mode.  To all the new CFs out there who are just trying to keep their heads above water, let me tell you... it does get better/easier/less stressful!  

This year I am doing a complete overhaul of the way I approach speech and language therapy... last year I was in survival mode which means that many times my kids were just playing games and practicing their speech and language goals.  This year I am having themed weeks and will be in charge of picking the activity 95% of the time.  I'm sure it will take some adjusting for both myself and my kiddos but in the long run I think everyone will be happier/get more out of our time together in the speech room. 

taking advantage of Walmart's 10% cash back on school supplies 

The back to school stack continues to grow 

This summer I finally got around to organizing all my TpT materials into thematic groups. 

Finally got my back to school ice breaking activity up on TpT!  It includes three different graphic organizers (varying skill level) that students can use to summarize their summers. Also included are 12 wh- ice breaking questions about summer and the start of the school year. I plan to use these activities as an ice breaker, to collect informal baseline data, and target various speech and language goals.  It's 20% off for the next 24 hours!  You can find it here

SLP Natalie

Just Imagine How Much Cooler I'll Be In Summer

We have one week of school left and let me just tell you how excited this SLP is!  99.9% of my IEPs are done, reports cards are in the process of being completed, my room is getting cleaned up, and my kiddos have officially checked out.

This last week in speech has been all about keeping my kiddos engaged and learning while keeping it fun and light.  This week in speech....

We made speech sandcastles... Thanks Crazy Speech World for this fantastic idea!

We worked on synonyms, pronouns, verbs, and much more with this summer themed language packet

We started working on our speech yearbooks created by Crazy Speech World.

As the school year comes to an end it is crazy to think that it has been a year since I graduated from UW-Eau Claire ready to hit the ground running.  This year has been a roller coaster of ups and downs but I would not have it any other way.  

Woohoo!

I don't know about y'all but right around the end of the school year I am struggling to come up with a way to keep my speechies motivated while keeping my material making to a minimum (IEP meetings anyone?).  Just in case you were not aware/are living under a rock Teachers Pay Teachers is having a sale for the next 36ish hours.  In addition to the TpT sale a lot of the stores (including mine) are having an additional sale.  Go fill up your shopping carts with some end of the year goodies! I know I did :)  

SLP Natalie

Egg-cellent Week in Speech

I don't know about y'all but this past week was a struggle.  Because of all our snow days (15 in total!) we lost all of our spring break and the kids (and teachers!) desperately needed a break!  This week was more a "how can I stretch a small out amount of therapy materials to make them last all week long". This speech therapist was in desperate need of a break!

This week in speech we enjoyed many Easter themed activities...

We searched for eggs with our speech sounds inside... which sometimes ended up as just playing with the grass... lesson learned

We worked on our location words as well as following directions by 

hiding eggs in our Where's the Egg? books

We played Easter Bingo (freebie can be found here)

We worked on irregular plurals with these fun eggs (freebie can be found here)

All in all it was a pretty good week, made even better by the fact that we did not have school on Good Friday or Easter Monday... that means a long weekend back in Minnesota for this SLP.  

Next week we will be celebrating Earth Day and learning all about the 3 Rs.

I hope y'all have a wonderful and blessed Easter. 

Spring Time in the Speech Room

I don't know about y'all but it's finally starting to feel like spring around here.  Last week we averaged mid 70s all week and you will hear no complaining from this SLP.  I think this warmer weather is God's way of saying hey sorry you didn't get a spring break last week so I will give you beautiful weather.  The kids knew we were supposed to be on Spring Break last week so they were all a little stir crazy which makes Miss K. a little crazy but we made it through. 

This week we celebrated all things spring including making umbrellas, feeding caterpillars, counting raindrop syllables, and working on our language goals.  

Counting syllables in multisyllabic words in our Rain Shower Syllables Activity 

We made umbrellas with our target sounds written on raindrops and worked on Synonyms, Irregular plurals, and irregular past tense verbs with the Spring Time Language Packet

We worked on requesting, following directions, and sequencing while feeding a Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Even though we did not get a spring break it was fun to celebrate the arrival (finally!) of spring. 45 days until Summer break... not that I'm counting or anything :) 

St. Patrick's Day Snow Day

We have now entered into snow day number 15... last night it iced/winter mixed so what started out as a two hour delay has since morphed into snow day number 15.  So Crazy!  All the teachers at school keep saying "This is not a normal winter" "We never get weather like this".  I am bummed because I had some awesome bright green Toms that I was finally going to bust out in celebration.  I am glad I have a full week of St. Patrick's Day activities planned so we can still celebrate in the speech room even after the day has passed. I decided to use this snow day to trial run a craft I had planned with my kiddos to make sure it was something my kinders could be successful at.  

This week (whenever we get back to school) we are going to make speech rainbows!

This is a super easy craft that I think 99.9% of my kiddos will enjoy.  All you need are paper plates, crayons, cotton balls, yellow construction paper, and glue.  

Cut the paper plates in half and have students color them like rainbows... I chose to cut mine to make it  more of an arch but I will probably have the kiddos just leave their plates in half... glue cotton balls on one end and then glue yellow construction paper circles on the other end for the gold at the end of the rainbow.  For this example I put target /k/ words on my gold pieces but you can modify it to fit your students needs.... and voila!  A quick and easy St. Patrick's day craft 

The infamous green Toms... I'll just need to wait for warmer weather 

to bust these bad boys out again 

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind always be at your back. 

May the sun shine warm upon your face,

and rains fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again,

May God hold you in the palm of His hand. 

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

SLP Natalie 

Happy Belated Birthday Dr. Seuss

I had a full week of  Dr. Seuss related therapy activities planned out for Dr. Seuss' birthday/Read Across America.   However, the weather had other plans... we ended up having snow days on Monday, Tuesday and Friday the first week in March!  We had some Seuss-tastical fun on Wednesday and Thursday but I had way too many activities lined up to not extend Dr. Seuss week.  This week in speech we:

Read Dr. Seuss books in the iPad

Worked on Synonyms by matching Horton the Elephants the matching Clover 

Dressed up like our favorite Dr. Seuss characters 

Made Cat in the Hat hats with our speech sounds on them 

Flipped Green Eggs with our speech words on them 

Sequenced Green Eggs and Ham

One of the teachers in my school sent us this great smartboard pack with celebrities like 

Justin Bieber and Tim Tebow reading some of our favorite Dr. Seuss books.

My kinders got a kick out of the biebes reading The Cat in the Hat

We  made Truffula Tree forests with our own Lorax to protect them.  

I had each kiddo work for their pom poms by saying their words x number of times

and then we drew the trunks on our Truffula Trees.

All in all I would say our Seuss themed week (and two days) was a hit.  I am gearing up for a St. Patrick's week full of green and gold and NO SNOW!

SLP Natalie

Stellar Speech

I don't know about y'all but this week has just been crazy busy making up meetings and evaluations that have been missed due to snow days.  That being said, this week I have been running on survival mode (aka flying by the seat of my pants).  Usually I go into a week feeling prepared and have my theme for the week all laid out with fun activities for my kiddos. Don't get me wrong we have still been having fun in speech but it has been a plan as I go kind of week.  

This week's theme (if you can call it that) was Outer Space.  While we did many fun space themed things, I am leaving this week just thanking Jesus that I have survived. 

We worked on pronouns, verbs, and creating sentences with this activity from Crazy Speech World's Intergalactic Expressive Language Package (find it here)

We made our own solar system with our speech sounds written on the stars. 

We worked on Synonyms by matching stars to their synonyms in different constellations (activity can be found here).  

I am excited to have time this weekend to get ready for our Dr. Seuss week so I can feel ready to tackle the week head on.  

SLP Natalie

P.S. Have you taken advantage of the sale on Teachers Pay Teachers??  Not going to lie I went a little crazy but it could be worse... it could be drugs. 

2014 Speech Olympics... Cancelled due to Snow

Sadly the snowpocalypse is putting a serious damper on our speech Olympics... I had a full week of activities planned including art projects, games, and competitions for my speech kiddos to take part in/earn their gold medals.  The first two days of our Speech Olympics were a blast. We made Olympic torches, competed in table curling, and read about/watched videos of our favorite sports.  I am bummed that our Speech Olympics were cut short, but even sadder that this snow means we probably lost our Spring Break (#schoolSLPproblems).  I'm trying to find the positive in this situations which is more time to get ready for our Black History Month theme next week and get some other materials made.

A lot of my kiddos had no clue what the Winter Olympics entailed... 

to get ready for our Speech Olympics we watched this video to learn about the Winter Olympics.  We also worked on our regular and irregular past tense verbs by pausing the video and talking about what the athletes did.

The entrance to our Speech Olympics... on the back wall are all the kiddos flags we made last week.  Each one represents my kiddos just like each flag in the Olympics represents a country. 

Some of my kinders with their Olympic torches... we wrote our special sound words on each of the flames. 

We worked on creating grammatically correct statements and using adverbs

We read about some of our (and by our I mean my) favorite winter sports and filled out a graphic organizer about what we read. 

A lot of our Speech Olympic activities came from my Speech Olympic packet that can be found in my TpT store.

Our First Full Week of School!

We finally had our first full week of school!  I never thought I would be so excited to type those words but man these crazy snow days have really been throwing off my schedule as well as all my kiddos' schedule!  This week was a struggle for all of us as we acclimated to a full 5-day school week.  I also finally got to use all my materials for my winter themed week.  The one good thing about the snow days is I was able to collect actual snow for my kiddos.  I'm sure I looked like the crazy person in my apartment complex trying to collect snow off my car but it was totally worth it.  The kiddos loved using all our senses to describe snow.  We also used a ton of fun activities from some of my favorite SLPs on Teachers Pay Teachers.  All in all I would say our winter week was a winter wonderland of fun. 

Working on pronouns 

Describing snow using all our senses

Using all our sense to describe snow... the kids got a 

kick out of playing with the snow inside

Building Snowman Synonyms 

We worked on regular past tense verbs

I had my kiddos take turns drawing out cards 

and we would act them out then talk about what we did

This week we also started getting ready for our Speech Olympics which included each student making their own flag to represent themselves in the Speech Olympics.  I quickly discovered that my kiddos had no clue that the Olympics were upon us/had now clue what the Winter Olympics included.  So we had a crash course in one of Miss. K's favorite things.

Learning about all the winter sports we will see in the Winter Olympics

My reading kiddos read about and became the "expert" on different Winter sports 

and came up with four important facts about that sport to share with our group,

We worked on comprehension skills, correct grammar, and articulation skills.

This is part of the Speech Olympics pack.

My weekend project... getting Miss. K's speech room

ready for the speech Olympics

Let the Games Begin!

That Time a Snow Day Turned Into A Snow Week

Not sure how it is where you are at, but here in North Carolina we have been suffering from a constant state of cold weather/snow for the past two weeks.  This being said we have been in school 2.5 out of 7 days.  I had a great winter themed week in store for my kiddos including a lot of fun activities including this fun multi-goal penguin activity from Crazy Speech World.  Only a couple of my kiddos have gotten to make penguins so I am thinking of modifying next week into winter themed activities while getting ready for our Speech Olympics (more to come on that soon!).  This weather needs to get gone soon because I would really love to see my kiddos more than twice this month.  

Playing Don't Break the Ice with my Artic Group

Learning all about Penguins

Constructing our Penguin Talk Craftivity
Thanks Crazy Speech World!

SLP Natalie

No Way Words

My kiddos have been increasingly negative as we have been progressing through the year.  I have been hearing a lot of "I can't" and "I don't know" which is driving me bananas. I am hoping that a visual will help remind my kids that it's ok not to know but it's not ok to not try. 

'

Hopefully this will help keep my kiddos motivated to keep up the good work and try their best.  

If your speech room needs a little motivation you can find this at my Teachers Pay Teachers store here. 

Happy Friday Y'all!  

Hopefully you can get to enjoy this long weekend! 

SLP Natalie