Tip for an IEP shortcut

I've been writing tons of IEPs here lately. It has lead me to the great conclusion that there are some things informational things that I can copy and paste.

If you were to ever run across one of the IEPs I have contributed to, you would find that I am a very detail oriented person. I like to include a little blurb about the assessments that I use on re-evaluations. Now, my district has asked us to include a brief description of our assessments on our meeting summaries as well. I don't mind doing this at all; however, at some point all the typing gets a little redundant. I finally gave up and created a word document to keep a brief summary of every assessment tool that I use on hand. I just copy and paste to evaluation documents and the summary page. This way every parent receives a uniform and thorough description of the test without increasing the amount of time it takes for me to write up reports.

Since the majority of these assessments are copyrighted, I obviously cannot upload this file to my blog and have blurred out the names in the picture above. I just want to share this suggestion as a way to save some valuable time at the expense of roughly 30 minutes of one day (depending on how many assessments you use).

Score!

I think there is a common theme among SLPs that we're all just a little overwhelmed this semester. I'm afraid that my creative posts may suffer for a few weeks until I can get a better handle on things at work. However, I am in the process of slowly making a few more things and am still hitting up the thrift stores.

I wanted to share with all of you my most recent "scores" from Goodwill.

This game is from the makers of Scrabble and it reminds me of a crossword. I plan on using it for phonemic awareness activities and vocabulary. It was brand new and only 1.99.

From: Game Night Guys

The biggest score of the evening was none other than:

The book was 1.00 and the discount card made it a grand total of .80 cents. If you haven't heard of these books, you need to check them out at your local library. I love this series and there are tons of pre-made materials on TPT if you like that site. Here is one freebie that I plan on using with it next year.

Oh the weather outside is frightful.....

I haven't had much time this week to work on the blog. This half of the school year is slammed with IEP meetings, paperwork, and staff meetings. The cold weather hasn't helped the situation (canceling and rescheduling meetings are the stuff of nightmares). So tonight's post is more of a journal entry....

I've started using MyFitnessPal to help with my diet. It's a really nice and FREE calorie tracker. You can enter everything that you eat for the day and how much exercise you did. In the past, I've never really paid all that much attention to counting calories. I just stopped eating potatoes and walked. It took about a year and I lost 40 pounds. However, I was in college where I had to walk around campus quite a bit. I don't have the benefit of going up and down three flights of stairs multiple times a day anymore. The calorie tracker forces me to think harder about what I'm eating. I've restricted myself to half a can of soda a day (when I drink it) and am cutting back on potatoes again.

We finally finished our 9th grade hearing screenings this week so I missed a day of therapy. I'm very happy that hearing screenings are finally over. Plus, I got to see the other SLPs again. We typically see each other once a month unless we are trading assessment materials. I think the loneliness sometimes gets to me as much as I do enjoy the staff at my school. There's just no one else who really understands what I do even though the EC staff has gotten to see me in action this year.

Anyways, I hope all of you have a great weekend. I plan on trying to get a little Medicaid billing done so I can focus on evaluations and IEPs next week.

Articulation Antics

My hands will probably never forgive me for all the recent crafting projects I have started. Pinterest is completely to blame and my therapy room is going to reap great benefits. I got this idea after seeing an environmental print alphabet book. I just took it up a notch.

This project is definitely one to call "a work in progress." I've been at it for about two months now and still have lots of things to continue adding with the help of my students. (P.S. It doesn't take nearly as long if you use clip-art from Microsoft. I just like to gather magazines & enough sales ads for this sort of thing.) It's a great way to interest your articulation groups into paying attention to their environment and it teaches new categorization/vocabulary for language skills. 

I save all of my pictures in an old ice-cream container. It's easy to store and  tote around with me.

These are the books that I am currently working on. I have pictures saved up for vowels as well. 

Sorting process. It takes me about an hour to get everything ordered.
I finally got smart and stuck the clippings with their book into a Ziploc bag after the 4th time of doing this.

Close up of a few piles. 

What you'll need:
Magazines, sales ads, old boxes, newspapers, tags (aka. anything you can cut up), stickers....
Small photo albums (I decided to make one per sound. The black ones were .49 cent at Salvation Army and the sparkly ones came from Walmart for $1.)
Note cards that fit your albums (Mine are 4 by 6)
Lots of tape
Scissors

Now that the bones of my books are started, I plan on having my students help me add more pictures to these books. Future students will reap the benefits just by looking for pictures with the target sound and making sentences for them. I tried to use categories for each page of the album which include: things kids like, games & movies, mommy things, daddy things, grocery store shopping, numbers, names, and words. I also have an "I spy" section in the back of each book that mixes items and words.

I plan on using these books with my J. Moncure alphabet books. I LOVE using these books for articulation therapy once we get past the word level. I've bought all of mine from thrift stores for $2 and under though I still do need a few more letters to have the complete set.                                
                                      

If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it....

If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do.-- Lucille Ball

The past two teacher workdays have been rather exhausting. The data system we use for IEP paperwork, CECAS, went down yesterday afternoon for maintenance. It was a bit unfortunate to say the least. I spent the majority of Thursday trying to get as much information entered into upcoming IEPs/re-evaluations done as possible and then billed Medicaid. All in all, it was a rather monotonous kind of day  mirrored by a bit of nasty weather. I decided to avoid my home computer after working all day on my work one. Yesterday, I devoted most of the 6 hour day (2 hour delay thanks to about 1.5 inches of snow) to  crafting projects. They still aren't completed yet, but I'm hoping that I will get to share them in the near future. 

In the meantime, I have made another round of articulation hedbandz in my mini "celebration" of the Medicaid billing website being down for maintenance too! (Which was totally unexpected surprise this afternoon when I went to work on it.) 

Here is the link for a copy.

In other good news, I found a really neat little game at Goodwill yesterday. It's called Monster Mash and is from the late 80s/early 90s.

It's basically a matching game using the "thwackers" to find the right monster. I am going to use Post-Its to add tasks to the cards (articulation words and 2-step directions) on the back. The concept is very similar to that of the ever popular "SLAP" game from pinterest.

Trying to keep my head above the water...

It's been a crazy past two weeks in my little corner of the world. We've had several students moving in and are trying to ease the transition of another who is moving away. I also got word of 6 students that needed to be screened from SST (our RtI team) and 4 hearing screenings. I managed to get all of the screenings and two of the hearing screenings done in one day. Hooray for small successes!

The next installment of artic hedbanz is also here at long last.

Here is a copy for you.

We're all Copy Cats here

I have a few students with goals to repeat directions and phrases back to me. The easiest way for me to explain it to them, is that we are going to play copy cat. They can get a little carried away with it sometimes, but for the most part I have found that it's an easy way to get them excited. I decided to make this activity as a stress reliever this week. Here is a copy for you. 

The white cats go up to seven word utterances and the orange ones range from 8-11 words. 

You can even make paper plate cats and feed the cards to them for correct productions.