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 :)