Quick & Easy Back-to-School Tips {Guest Blogger Speechasaurus}

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, Amy from Speechasaurus is sharing a few of her tips.

Hello everyone! First off, I would like to thank Nicole Allison for coming up with this fabulous series and for allowing me to be a part of it! My name is Amy and I am the human behind Speechasaurus. Last year at this time, I was preparing to head back to school AND planning a wedding. Although I had the most incredible day at our wedding (I have never felt more surrounded by love), I am totally okay with not attempting both of those tasks at the same time again this fall! Here are a few back to school tips that I hope you find useful!

1. Forget about school (just for a minute) and get yourself ready. Back to school time is always really busy and I know that I personally can’t live on frozen pizza (I wouldn’t really place that in the “brain food” category)! So one thing I am doing this year is some major meal prep. I am filling up the freezer with freezer meals, and thanks to Pinterest I’ve even found a bunch of crock pot freezer meals. I mean it seriously doesn’t get any better than that!

2. Beautify your work space. If you have a “speech room” the possibilities are pretty endless for what you can do here.  It doesn’t have to be anything expensive, just something that makes the four walls that hold your materials feel like your four walls that form a safe, inviting, and happy place for you to make a positive change in the lives of your students. If you don’t have a “speech room” then go find yourself a nice bag you love! If you aren’t in the market for a new bag, then find a planner that matches your personality or grab some cute file folders out of the dollar section at Target to hold all of your paperwork lists. I’m no psychologist, but I know that I am more motivated to pull things out and work on them when I like the way they look on my desk (or coffee table)!

3. My last tip is by far the most important one.  When kids come back from summer vacation, they will likely have 1.5 million stories they want to share with you! Let them! In order for therapy to be functional, it is essential that we know about what our students want to talk about. This is also a great time to jot down a few notes about how those skills you worked on together last year fared over the summer months. If Elsa is working on her /s/ sound, I’d make a note of all the /s/ words she struggled with during her story about her summer vacation to Arendelle  and *vwah-lah* you already have the beginning of her personal list of therapy targets! If you have tighter lipped students, try using a more structured approach to build rapport. I like using my Daily Conversation Starters or This or That: An Opinion Activity, but there are many other activities on Teachers Pay Teachers and elsewhere that can help get students talking about their interests.

Make sure to follow Speechasaurus!