Quick & Easy Back-to-School Tips {Guest Blogger Home Sweet Speech Room}

For the entire month of August, I have a fun little series starting on the blog. A few of your favorite bloggers are coming together to provide us with some “Quick and Easy Back-to-School Tips.” We all need these don’t we? I just love being part of a community that is so generous and giving! Today, Carissa from Home Sweet Speech Room is sharing a few of her tips.

Thanks so much to Nicole for the invitation to write a guest post today!  I just finished up my first year in the schools, and I found these things extremely helpful.  Hopefully, they can help make your life a little easier too!

First up is a tip for scheduling!  Every single SLP who has worked in a school has told me about scheduling nightmares.  I knew that I wanted it to be as quick and easy as possible, if it was even possible.  I created a form with the 5 days of the week and the different time slots where I would schedule students.  I wrote a note at the top with the students’ names that I would need to pull and how many minutes I would need to pull them each week.  I had them cross out any section where they could not be pulled because of protected time or special area (art, PE, music, library).  It worked wonders!  I made a first draft fairly easily and then only had to tweak a few students once that draft was made.  All in all, it only took me about half a day to get it figured out.  Here’s the form I used:

Tip number two is about using what I call “Year at a Glance” and a “Due This Month” sheets.  The first is a sheet that has all of the months of the year (August through June) with lines under it.  On there, I map out all of my IEP and re-evaluation due dates.  That way, I know how heavy each month is going to be.  If I see there will be a crazy March, I know to start working way ahead of time on those.  I keep these pages at the very beginning of my planner.

I do something similar for my “Due This Month” pages.   These are kept in my planner before the calendar for that month.  That way, when I flip to the tab for a given month, I know what the paperwork will look like, what meetings I will need to schedule, and which teachers I will need to find to discuss their students’ progress, strengths, weaknesses, grades, and more.

Both of these pages have helped me map out the year and months.  Ultimately, they have kept me extremely organized and cut down on my stress during those crazy months since I have planned accordingly. These pages are both a part of my Simplified Speech Therapy Planner in my TpT store if you are interested!

I hope you find both of those tips helpful!   For more tips and helpful products, follow me on Facebook, Pinterest, and my blog! Thanks so much for reading!