I'm Terrible At Updating This

I realize that I haven't updated this blog in way too long. Spring semester was easy to pass over because I was at Head Start working with birth-3 kiddos, which did not take really any lesson planning at all. We were focused on child-directed play so I really just went into the classrooms and followed each client's lead. This was very fun and did not require much outside thinking but did require a lot of in the moment planning. I discharged a few of my kids and ended the semester with only one client.

I also had a preteen who was working on or, ar, and er. Since he was older we could focus on therapy instead of "making therapy fun & engaging" so we spent a lot of time on self-monitoring strategies and we played with Linguasystem /r/ cards. I discharged him from therapy about halfway through the semester because he made such huge gains on his goals.

This summer I'm out on practicum at an outpatient pediatric rehab facility. Most of my clients are birth-6 but we have some older kids, too. I love the environment because parents usually come into the sessions and there is a lot of educational opportunities. We also have more severe cases than what I have seen at the university clinic or at Head Start. There are two supervising SLPs at my placement so it has been interesting to see different styles of doing speech therapy. I'm slowly taking clients away from my supervisors and building up my caseload. It is way different planning for 8+ different kids every morning than having a few clients multiple times a week. I'm learning how to do therapy by the seat of my pants. However, I'm still holding onto my love of lesson planning and trying to cater activities to each individual kid.

Lately I've realized the wealth of activities that are on the internet. So, instead of reinventing the wheel, I've been trying to utilize what is out there. This blog is going to focus more on a place for me to look back on someday to see what I have done instead of just being new and innovative stuff. I'm going to cite where I've gotten my ideas but most will also have little twists on them.