Let me keep it real by saying, “YES, doing this is a pain in the butt & no school SLP has time for this,” BUT is still important & it’s usually time well spent. Also, I think everyone is overthinking it; it doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s truly as easy as 1 trial therapy session, so school SLPs, hear me out. HERE’s the WHY: 1. It can save you time in the long run. I’ve taken baseline data on skills only to discover that I didn’t REALLY need to be working on them. In my admin position, I had staff take baseline data on goals they’d written, and they learned the same. Sometimes the ..read more

Do you feel guilty dismissing students because it seems like everyone is against it? Do you avoid it because you’re too tired to fight it? Do you get kickback from staff or from parents? I know that’s how I felt for many years. During my 24 years in schools, it felt like the whole world wanted me to keep kids in therapy for ETERNITY. The “D word” (dismissal) often felt like a dirty word. Late in my career, I realized that we needed to STOP talking about dismissal at the END of the therapy process and START talking about it from day 1! HOW DO YOU DO THAT?  At the initial IEP meeting, m ..read more

Do you ever struggle to decide the frequency (days per week or month) and the length of therapy sessions to recommend for a child with a speech sound disorder? If you’re school based, do you wonder how to determine which service delivery model would be best?  I sometimes did, too, but I thought that maybe I was alone in that. Well, during my last 4 years in schools, I was an SLP supervisor, and when looking at caseloads, I was shocked to see that about 90% of children (artic or language) had therapy 30 minutes twice per week on their IEPs. WOW! Surely these children don’t ALL have the ex ..read more

A very big part of our job is assessment. You may have caught my previous blog post about my new semi-obsession with disinfecting therapy materials. Well, when I was packing up my testing materials to do two evaluations recently, I realized that I couldn’t risk germ transmission through the testing materials that two children would be touching that day. All I could think was, “my sweet babies can’t be touching these stimulas materials!” My biggest fear lately is having some part in a child getting sick. At first I thought, I’ll just let them use a pencil, but the tests were from a clinic I co ..read more

We’re in month four of this pandemic. If you’re reading this, I hope you are well, and thank you for visiting. I’ve obviously had plenty of time to get on here and write, but I’ve been in such a funk. Like many of you, I jumped into telepractice, and while I’m still providing some services through teletherapy, I’ve recently returned to doing some face to face therapy.  I am a little shell shocked about how differently planning for sessions has been. All I think about is germs. I should say that, prior to Covid-19 I was not someone concerned about germs. In fact, I didn’t much think about ..read more

  How are you doing? No, seriously, don’t just say, “I’m fine” or “I’m okay.” How are you really doing?   Maybe you’re like me and can’t quite put your finger on it.   It’s all so weird. I feel like a newborn; my days and night are mixed up (hence the reason for all my middle of the night emails I’m sending to you if you’re a subscriber), and I never know what day or time it is. I left my house today (to get groceries) for the first time in 2 weeks. Between the synthetic itchiness and that constant hot breath from the mask + the anxiety of being out in the big, b ..read more

While I’m at home practicing “social distancing” and binge watching Disney+, the least I could do was… something – anything– to help you cope with school closings due to this awful Covid-19 virus (or nasty alias Coronvirus). Here in Louisiana, every public school has closed their doors to students, but many educators (including SLPs) are still having to report for work and make a plan for serving students from afar. In an effort to help, I did some leg work for you and spent the day scouring the speech therapy freebies on TPT to find those that require little to no colored ink and also have co ..read more

I can’t say enough how much I love therapy in October. It’s just FUN. In my opinion, I can’t start the Halloween fun, though, until I’ve taught my clients about the routines and schemas of Halloween. Sometimes we assume they just know. I’ve learned not to assume; I’ve found they often don’t “get it” and can’t fully process what we are talking about until I’ve built their background knowledge. That’s one of the reasons (in addition to addressing specific language skills) why I created my Halloween interactive book all about Halloween. I teach all about trick-or-treating (going door to door wit ..read more

I’ve had the pleasure of supervising many CF-SLPs over the years, and I eventually created a handout for them- just a handy list to keep them on track. This is basically THAT LIST for you- even though I didn’t get to be your CF supervisor One thing I learned from being in this field is NEVER to assume. By that, I mean, never to assume someone was taught something in their undergrad or graduate school program- or taught something by their parents. No matter how brilliant of a CF-SLP you are (because I’m sure you are), everyone benefits from mentoring, support and feedback. I suppose I’ve been ..read more

Happy Independence Day, America & all of my readers! My recent travels to the northeast (Coastal Maine, specifically) has reminded me how truly BEAUTIFUL our country is! Sure, our government is currently in the crapper, but this is the land people from all over the world flock to. WHY? Well, we have big, nasty problems, but we also have FREEDOM (of speech, religion, assembly, petition, and the press, for starters) and OPPORTUNITY! While the currently state of USA politics is frustrating for all sides involved, I see my fellow Americans losing heart for our country. I, myself, find ..read more