Organization: Speech & Language Materials Storage

Hello Everyone!

Welcome back to today's Tip Tuesday! I am super excited to share with you my tip for this week. I have been meaning to write this post for a long time, but wanted to really perfect my system. So this week I will be showing you how I like to organize my speech therapy materials in my speech room. Now, I am very lucky to have a classroom sized office, as I know this is very rare in the school settings. However, even though I have what seems like "infinite space", I try to consolidate, purge files or materials, and organize daily. I try and take at least 15 minutes (before or after school hours) to organize and put away materials to their "home" place. Once you get in this habit, you won't even realize you're doing it and it's always less stressful to start and end the day in an organized and efficient environment (or so I've read).

I like to use themes or units throughout the year when planning and implementing therapy sessions. I usually begin a new theme every week, or in some cases, two weeks. I am a very "out of sight out of mind" person, so I need everything to be very easily accessible and quick to grab. Like many SLP's, I don't have much time between groups to prep for the next incoming group, since I see kids back to back! This system makes it so easy for me to "grab and go". Below are pictures and explanations of how I organize all of my activities and themes :)

Above are my filing cabinets. I have them labeled and categorized by:

theme, season, concept. I also have two separate drawers for articulation, and pragmatics on the end. 

 I have 3 units in total with 6 drawers. Here shows how the insides of my filing cabinets are organized. I put all of my paper and loose materials in plastic gallon bags and file each bag by it's theme. I also sort the themes in alphabetical order. 

These two pictures are just examples of my materials inside their plastic bag. This is my dinosaur themed unit! I store it all in this zip-lock bag! It's perfect to "grab and go" if you want to use this in your office or even in another location.

Here are my vehicles and dinosaur themed bags. 

This is my articulation drawer. Here you can see that I have my DIY articulation organizer swiffer box (if you want to learn all about how I organized this, for FREE, click HERE!) I also have some articulation game boards, more printable articulation playing cards (from LinguiSystems) stored in yet another swiffer box (love these), multi-syllable words themed activities, and more! Behind the files are more hanging files.

I also organize my articulation handouts (for either drill practice in therapy or homework for home) in this handy 10 pocket hanging file folder system! I categorized the pockets by place of articulation. I love this, because it's so easy to quickly grab the materials and immediately begin targeting a phoneme you're working on.

These are the handouts I store in the hanging file system (black and white for parents for homework and colored for me). I also included some articulation visuals used for cueing or to provide immediate feedback. They love using this stoplight visual to either be rated or to rate themselves. It's really is a great visual feedback tool :)

Above is a bookshelf where I keep my SuperDuper cards, Natural Learning Concepts photo cards, Kaufman cards, and other printable picture cards I made. I keep them in plastic bins stacked vertically for easy access. I like how the labels are on top of the card boxes so I can quickly sort through them! 

Above the cards, I have more colorful bins that hold my wind-up toys, toy manipulatives, game pieces (like my giant die) and more picture or name cards. 

Lastly, I hang my articulation jars on the wall vertically. It really maximizes space and is easily accessible. I use to store them in a super big drawer, but I wasted a lot of time weeding through the jars to find the one I wanted. This system works great, because I can just grab one out of it's bag and easily put it away when I'm done. 

Here are what the articulation jars look like close up. They hold mini toys that begin with a target sound.  These are great to use with the younger kiddos!

I hope that was a good explanation of how I like to organize my speech and language materials cards! How do you organize your materials? Leave your answer in the comment section!

Thanks for tuning in to today's Tip Tuesday and please come back next week :)

Theme of the Week: Dinosaurs Freebie!

Hey Everyone!

Happy Friday :) I wanted to share my latest Freebie Friday with you today! Many preschoolers, including my 4 year old niece, LOVE dinosaurs and have requested that we use them into our "Theme of the Week". So, of course I had to plan some speech therapy activities incorporating these historical creatures. Below you can take a look at what we did!

The first activity requires the students to categorize foods, school items, and animals. 

The second activity targets production of regular past tense verbs in an exciting dinosaur themed game! 

Have your players pick a card from the pile and correctly identify the regular past verb in the sentence provided. In the upper right hand corner, there will be a picture of either a dinosaur or volcano. Players can sort their dinosaur cards onto their mats. The first player to collect all three different dinosaurs wins (volcanos don’t count)! The directions are provided!

Lastly, I made three different play-doh mats to target receptive and expressive vocabulary skills, following directions, and pragmatics!

Clothing/Weather Concepts:

Work on Receptive and Expressive Language Tasks when playing with play-doh! Give directions to “put the play-doh on the hat” or “roll play- doh on something you wear on your feet”.

Emotions:

I love using these with my spectrum kiddos! This is great when targeting emotions or pronouns “he” and “she”. Have them identify and express the girl’s or boy’s facial emotions.

All in all, this was a great week! My students had a blast and were really motivated this week when using dinosaur themed materials. What do your preschoolers request to play with? Thanks for reading today's Tip Tuesday and App Reivew. Come on back next week for more!! Please follow me on Twitter and on my TeachersPayTeachers account for your most updated tips and FREE materials!

Get your Freebie HERE!

Have a great week everyone :)

Let's Talk About Apps!

App Review: Disfluency Index Counter

By: Smarty Ears

Today's Tip Tuesday is featuring the Disfluency Index Counter App! I’ve used this app many times when working with children who have disfluent speech. I typically use it during evaluations, when monitoring progress, and in therapy sessions. This app allows you to perform a live count of the number of fluent or disfluent syllables. The graphics are very clear and the buttons are grouped nicely, which helps for quick access during conversations or speech samples.

This app allows you to identify the types of disfluenices produced by the child. You can categorize the disfluency by Block, Repetition, and Prolongation.

I also really appreciate the fact that the data is then calculated into both the percentage of stuttered syllables and the types of stuttered syllables. This is a real time saver! You also have the option to print or e-mail the results.

Improvements: I always like to have the ability to save my students’ data to show progress within an app. This app does offer one, but you are only able to record and access a students’ progress through an additional app called the “Therapy Report Center”, also by Smarty Ears. Though this appears to be a well-organized app that allows you to create an in-depth profile of your child, it’s just one more step I have to complete before accessing results (which can be time consuming if I am conducting an initial evaluation or screening).

Overall, this is a very helpful app that I like to use with my disfluent kids. I think that teachers and parents would have a difficult time using this app, because they would need to be knowledgeable about the different types of disfluencies in order to calculate an accurate fluency index. Right now, this app is priced at $8.99!  Since this app does not have a lite version, you can check out a tutorial here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JXfAhqLXbI. 

What apps do you like to use with your students? Thanks for reading today's Tip Tuesday and App Reivew. Come on back next week for more!! Please follow me on Twitter and on my TeachersPayTeachers account for your most updated tips and FREE materials!

Picture Vocabulary Cards: Clothing Freebie

Hey Guys!

Welcome back from winter vacation!! I hope it was fabulous :) I had the best break! We were given two snow days (thanks New England weather!) which made our vacation two full weeks! It was very relaxing, but made the return that much harder! When I came back, I quickly realized that my needier kids did regress a little and that we needed a vocabulary refresher. So, I made a bunch of picture vocabulary cards and today I am sharing the Clothing category.

I love using these for expressive and receptive vocabulary tasks. When targeting expressive vocabulary, I like to print out two sets and play Memory, Matching, or Go Fish. 

For receptive language tasks, I line them up in a field of 3 and ask them to identify a picture. I also like to play Bingo with these too! 

Want your own copy? Click HERE! If you download, leave a comment below and let me know what you think!

Thanks for reading today's Freebie Friday and come back next week for more!! Please follow me on Twitter and on my TeachersPayTeachers account for my most updated and FREE products!