St. Patrick's Day Craftivity

Next week is state testing for my 3rd-5th graders.  It's a week of wonky schedules, proctoring, and pulling the kids I can when I can.  So I need an activity that is relatively easy to throw together, quick, and meaningful. Additionally, my Olympics themed bulletin board has run its course.  The social worker and I usually care for this bulletin board together, since it is outside of her office.  We have another one down the hallway that I put Mia McDonald's Idiom of the Week up.  

Say goodbye to the Olympics!

It has been a brutal winter here, so I want to start thinking Spring!  As always, thank goodness for Pinterest.  I found this cute free craftivity from The Teacher Wife.

Photo Credit to The Teacher Wife

With my 3rd grade and up groups, we could get the activity done in 20 minutes.  My K-2 kids need closer to 30 for the cutting and writing parts.  But it's a great activity to model sentences with, talk about feelings, follow directions, and really brighten someone's day.  I sent this picture to one of the teachers in my building when her 1st grader came up with this response:

Photo taken by my student. Can you see his sleeve in the corner?

If you are looking for a quick craftivity that you can use with a wide variety of students, I would strongly suggest this one.

May your day be touched
by a bit of Irish luck,
brightened by a song in your heart,
and warmed by the smiles
of the people you love.

And may we have no snow days to mess with state testing!  :)

What I Wish For...

By now, you've probably heard about the big 3 Million Teachers sale on TpT.  I am super excited about whittling down some of my wishlist!

1. No Print I "Mustache" You a Question: Answering and Formulating Questions by Sublime Speech.  What a versatile product for my K-2 crowd!  And no-print, which is great these days!

2. Speech and Language Common Core Cans by Nicole Allison of Speech Peeps.  I love the idea of exit questions. Great thing to do in the last few minutes of a session.

3. Conversation System: Visual Guide and Scoreboard by Kate Shepard. I am always on the lookout for activities that will help my social language kids.  Rubrics have been awesome for some of my students that have the fundamental skills and are working on carryover, but for those that are still working on those fundamental skills, I am excited to try something more visual.

I also have some clip art that I am excited for, but hopefully that will appear at a later time when I actually have time to make some new products!

In the meantime, check out Speech Room News, who is hosting another What's in Your Cart linky party to see what your other favorite bloggers have in their carts!

Caseload vs. Workload

Oh man, where have I been?  Well, I've been a busy busy BUSY SLP!  In fact, this particular blog post has been sitting in my draft box since the ASHA convention in November!

My split this year has been between two elementary buildings.  While I love working with the K-5 kids, both caseloads have grown as the year went on.  Last year, I added only 5 kids to my caseload during the whole year at a middle school.  This year, it seems like at least 2 kids a month- in each building!

There are a few things that I attribute the growth to.  The first is a change in the district RtI process.  I've gotten more referrals for screens for kids that teachers wouldn't bring to me, since more education has been given to teachers on my role.  Good and bad, right?  The second is that we have had a lot of move-ins this year from other districts, and it seems like they all come with an IEP!

For my own sake, I started to document my time using this ASHA workload analysis sheet.  It's broken down into categories so you can determine just where your week goes.  It's really quite eye opening.  I started to track my minutes before I went to the ASHA convention in November, and have been trying to ever since.  To help my case, I went to an ASHA seminar on adopting a workload method from Laura Epstein.  It was pretty interesting. She suggested that the approach doctors use in their practice to determine practice caseload is a possibility for us.   Patient panels are the way PCP's decide how much time each patient should receive.  Basically, if you are a typical person, they assume so many doctor visits a year at a certain time value, based on your age and health.  Additionally, they use EBP to determine treatment times based on diagnoses.  Strep throat may be one visit for 15 minutes, while something else could be 15 minutes x 6 weeks of follow ups.  

This website has a pretty good explanation if you are curious. 

So what do they recommend you do if you feel absolutely overwhelmed?  Aside from retail therapy (guilty!), there are some more productive ways to work on alleviating the stress and advocating for yourself.


1. Chart your workload for a month. Ms. Epstein recommended calculating the percent of your week spent in each activity.  For those who don't remember how to do that, convert the time that you are contracted to be in the building to minutes, multiply by 5 for the 5 days a week. Then add the minutes you are spending in each activity for the week and divide that by the total minutes.  (e.g. if I am contracted to be in the building for 2250 minutes a week, and I spend 980 minutes in a week doing direct therapy, then I know that 43% of my week was spent directly giving therapy).  Don't forget to include things like lunch and plan time if they are in your contract.  You can calculate the percentage of your week that *should* be spent in those activities, and then you know if you are hitting that goal each week (I would love to meet a related service person who is!).  The ASHA Workload Analysis Survey that I linked to above is really helpful in this endeavor.

2. Look at your student population.  Kids who stutter may be a heavy time investment initially, but theoretically, as they move to the maintenance phase there is less of a time investment with them. Same with articulation.  However, if you have a caseload that is heavily language based, your "invested time" might start high and stay high.  Ms. Epstein recommended that as a practice, we start to derive a more formulaic approach to this, but thinking about my caseload, I'm not entirely sure how that would even work.

3. Ms. Epstein also recommended comparing your district to others in regards to prevalence of disabilities. In other words, what does your caseload look like compared to districts around you? Are you over identifying students?  This one can be tricky, I think, because I know some districts are "magnet" districts for certain disabilities, and people move to the district because they want the services provided by the district.

4. If you want to really go the extra mile and make your case, ASHA also offers other workload analysis sheets to really break down the time you are spending on activities, as well as the time you NEED to spend on those activities.  They also have some great examples and templates for you to use to really paint a picture for your administrators.  

5. Look at what your state has to say.  Some states have set certain guidelines, and there are a few districts that have adopted a workload model.  In my case, the guidelines are pretty general.  I can't have a caseload of more than 60 students, but that does not pertain to my workload. 

It can be frustrating when you feel like your workload is not manageable, and typically, you are not the only one a district to feel that way.  While it can be tedious to track your minutes on a daily basis, I truly do recommend it.  If for no other reason than to see just how your days look.  I know some days the final bell rings and I wonder what happened to the day!

How about you? Does anyone work in a district where caseload is not the driving factor in your assignments?  How did your district transition to a workload model, and what does that look like for you?  I'd love to hear about it!  Or if you are like me, and trying to collect the data you need to advocate for yourself, do you have any additional recommendations?