Good Byes and Hellos

I recently have released a few students from speech services. Often times I have mixed feelings about this. On one side, it’s good for the student to move on, they don’t need you anymore. Yet, we tend to grow rather fond of our students. Those of us working in elementary schools, we get to watch our students grow up. I work preschool through 6^th grade. I’ve only started the preschool part last year, but I have 3 of my preschoolers in kindergarten now. They’re already a little taller and a little more mature. It’s incredible just how quickly it all happens. And every year, a new batch of our kids are getting ready to enter Jr. High School. I hope and pray that they’ll be able to make it, that they’ll do okay.

The speech language pathologist has to have a big heart to do what we do with so many that we work with. We have to be flexible to let new kids enter our heart at a moments whim; yet, we have to be understanding when our students move with little notice.

I use to have a real hard time with good-byes. I’ve never much really liked them, but there have been so many in my life, not many were permanent though, just moving on from one stage of my life to another. This school year seems to be riddle with them. My school has a high turn over rate mostly due to our status as a title one school. I always have a stack of files that are ready and waiting for a file request, and I’m constantly adding kids to my schedule. My schedule has been all over the place this year. As if it wasn’t bad enough due to the fact that we’re also a year round school. At least some of the kids come and go so quickly that I don’t get time to get attached.

There are those who manage to sneak into your heart quicker than others. One that I released recently reminds me of my daughter, same spirit, same obsession with princesses, same smile. I had to let her go, and I was happy to hear from the mom that the student was very sad to have to end speech.

Luckily, we still have several years where she can say hello in the halls.

That nasty /r/ phoneme

Calling all pediatric SLPs!  This post is in regards to the bain of many SLPs' existences.  /R/.

My neighbors/friends asked if I would help them out. Their son is not saying his /r/'s correctly.  As you know, I work in the hospital with adults.  I am wanting to help them, but feeling like I might not be the best person for the job.  They are willing to try me anyway.

Their 12 year old has been in speech therapy for years.  He can produce /r/ correctly in structured tasks some/most of the time.  They do their speech homework. 

My questions to you are:

What are the cues you SLPs use to elicit the /r/?  (I know several of us use different cues.)

Do any of you take private clients at home, just informally?  Do I need to do any official paperwork??

Thanks guys!

Kristin

Therapy Dashing

Yeah, I’ve dropped the ball, haven’t written anything on the blog for 1 ½ weeks now. I am a world class slacker. Truthfully, things have just been busy, and I’ve been lazy on Tuesday mornings (when I usually write my new posts). So, I’m try to be better in the future.

Now I do have to admit, that even though I use my iPod touch a lot in speech therapy, I also play a lot of games on it. I recently bought a game called Mystic Emporium. I doubt you’ve heard of it, doesn’t matter, it’s basically a “Diner Dash” style game (don’t worry, I’m really getting somewhere with this). In the game Dinner Dash, you are a waitress trying to take care of a diner. You have to seat people, get their order, put the order in to the cooks, clean up their tables, etc. Seems simple, right? Well, once you get going to gets a little crazy, you have like 3 families waiting to be seated, you’re trying to get an elderly couples food out to them, while cleaning up several tables so more people can be seated. Basically it’s a time management game. You have to try to multi-task as much as possible, try to kill two birds with one stone whenever you can, basically try to survive while you have a million things to do.

 

It then hit me, are these kind of games so different than my life as a speech language pathologist? Working with teachers with classroom interventions, sending home this consent to evaluate, planning for that therapy session, finding time to evaluate a student, sped meetings, progress reports, IEPs, etc, etc, etc.

Suddenly the game seemed a little less interesting. It was starting to hit too close to home. 

Time management is something I’m still working on. Keeping on top of IEPs can be tricky when you are working year round. You have to pay attention to who is going off track soon so you can get their meetings done before they leave. Sometimes they sneak up on you. I’m trying to keep on top of the many referrals that I have coming through the wood works. I’m getting better about documenting everything so I don’t let any kids slip through the cracks.

Now I’m not going to even claim to be an expert in this area, I’m still trying to learn how to do this myself, but I have a book that’s been helping me keep everything in focus. First Things First by Stephen R. Covey, A. Rodger Merrill, and Rebecca R.Merrill has been a great asset. Now I don’t do everything in the book, actually, I need to do a whole lot more so I can stay on top of things. But the book doesn’t focus on staying on top of things so much as focusing on the most important things. 

I think sometimes we can get caught up so much into the paperwork and the logistics of everything that we end up sacrificing the child. I have to admit, at times when I have a lot of IEPs to write, and several other paperwork related items to get to, I’ve felt the “therapy” was getting in the way of me doing my job. Woah! What was that? Yeah, the things they teach in this book is helping me keep the right focus. The students come first; their progress is the most important. Of course everything else has to get done as well. That’s just the nature of our jobs. We have to be able to do everything. However, again, our priority has to be the people we’re serving weather it is students at a school or patients in a hospital.

Boardmaker Giveaway Winner

Hey all!  It's Kristin.  Thanks to those who participated in our first giveaway!  It's way fun to see the new followers and get new comments.  And the random (via random.org) winner is:

Entry # 22 - Jeremy Brown!  Jeremy - email me (see the side bar for my email) your address and I'll send you the goods.  Congrats!  I hope these Boardmaker discs come in handy. 

We'll do a new giveaway soon!

SLP Burnout

It's Kristin here!

FYI our giveaway ends tomorrow so hurray and enter (HERE).

Well, this was a long work week for me for some reason!  I think our job is heavy- all that face to face intense talking.  Coaxing phonemes, words, and memories out of people.  Managing behaviors, family members, doctors (or principals :)), and documenting it all.  And there's just no rest for the weary.  You'll be doing it all again tomorrow.

So what do you guys do to avoid burnout?  I haven't really been in the field that long yet, and already there are certain tasks that have become drudgery at times.  Some of the things we do are so repetitious.  Some of the patients are so tough!  Some of the politics get so old.

Not to be Negative Nelly today, but sometimes you just need a boost!  Sometimes I find that boost in a patient I love, or a conference, or a great patient breakthrough.  Sometimes just a long weekend or a vacation.  Sometimes there are little things in the workplace that help me- going to lunch instead of eating at my desk, taking a walk, hiding out on the hospital chapel or meditation room if I'm stressed, or getting some fresh air outside.  I even workout at lunch once in a while.  It's nice to have the PT gym right there!

Well, what do you guys do?  Any fresh ideas?

XOXO
~K

SLP CEUs...

...are expensive!!
I just want to complain a bit.  I wish I could go to ASHA every year.  I also wish I could get that "PROMPT method" training for apraxia I've been wanting for years, take one of Joe Murray's dysphagia courses, and take an sEMG course by Michael Groher.  A girl can dream.  The CEUs I actually end up getting are the free ones, or the local courses.  They don't tend to be what I really need.  Do you SLPs have the same tough time I do?

I will tell you some of my favorites.  I think the Passy-Muir company has great online courses.  They each take an hour and give you /1 CEU and they are packed with good info!  I also liked a Cross Country seminar I took on apraxia if you ever go to those.  I liked the Linguisystems CEU in the back of their dysarthria book. 

If you live in Utah we are actually hosting a training seminar this month by Dynavox.  It's 10/23 and is free!  You can get .6 CEUs.  If you are interested in coming you can email me (see my address on the side bar) and I'll save you a spot.  There are about 40 left.  It's going to be at the University of Utah (more details if you email).

Any other great CEU ideas?  I know we're always looking.

PS:  Don't miss our Giveaway.  This is the final week!

XOXO
~K

My iPod Touch in Therapy

I recently purchased the new iPod touch 4 (as I have mentioned in yesterdays post), which I had been saving up for for several months. In the last couple of weeks I've started using the iPod touch at work. I even purchased a few SLP apps for it. Its been great and it has helped immensely. I wanted to review some of the benefits to having an iPod touch or an iPhone as an SLP.

First off, there are many speech therapy apps that I'd rather go over in separate posts. Nonetheless the ones that I got are great. I got Pocket SLP, Artikpix, Percentally, and a ton of the free kindergarten vocabulary apps from kindergarten.com. I'm only started to get a feel for these different apps. I'm still trying to figure out how they fit in with my therapy. When I have had a little more time to get a feel for them I'll give reviews later on.

Okay, so first of all, having my schedule at my finger tips has been so helpful. Many of you know that I work at a year round school. You don't know what scheduling is like at a year round school until you've been there. You see, the kids still get there summer time off, but its dispersed through the year. There are 4 tracks of students with one track being off at all times. That means that you always have a different group of kids at school. I have students on all four tracks; and yes, my schedule changes every three to four weeks. I never know for certain who I'm going to see for therapy any given week. Now I have my schedule with me via google calendar that I can check at any time, with the students name, grade, track, teacher, room number, etc. I love it. I have a different google calendar assigned to each track of students. And I can decide which calendars I view. So, now when there's a track change, I simply turn off one track and turn on the other.

The new iPod touch also has a built in microphone (which they haven't had before) which any speech therapist would fine useful. You can also keep the mic on while running other apps. So, you could do artic probes on the device and record it at the same time. Next time you sync your device your speech sample will be backed up on your computer you can then  take that recording and burn it to a CD and put that in the student's file.

The new iPod touch also comes with a camera on the front and back that can take pictures and be used to create videos. There are lots of different things you can do with these resources. Not that we haven’t ever used a camera before, but now it’s just a tad bit more accessible. I like the idea of being able to make a PECS card out of anything in my room in a quick hurry. Also, the video (along with the digital recorder) is a great way to give the child feedback. I’m sure there are more things you can do with this, but I can’t think of anything else at the moment.

I’ll talk about specific apps, as I mentioned above, sometime in the near future. With that in mind, most of the therapy apps have some kind of data tracking mechanism. That is reason enough in my mind to run out and buy one of these things. I’ve sometimes said that I feel like can do one thing very very well, but my brain doesn’t always do too well with multi-tasking. The nice thing about letting the little device to assist in data tracking is that you can pay more attention to the therapy, helping the child, expanding language, have more in-depth discussion, etc. When it comes to artic you just press a button if they got the sound right or not, then at the end it’ll give you a percentage, which some apps will let you email, copy/paste, or even put into a spreadsheet. Can I tell you how much cleaner my therapy notes are going to be? Yeah, I’m pretty excited about that too.

Did I mention that this thing plays music? Yes, so you can pop that in while you’re doing progress reports late into the night to help maintain your sanity (something I did last night actually). I suppose you already know about that feature, considering the fact that it is an iPod after all.

And if you didn’t know, the sky is the limit as apps are concerned. There is an app for just about anything. I tried to keep this post to stick with the speech therapy related stuff, but I also have apps to help keep track of my exercising (which is easy to track at the moment because it’s not happening). I have a nifty budget app. I can keep my guitar tuned with an app. You can read ebooks, browse the web, watch TV shows, etc etc. I haven’t even mentioned the games that I’ve purchased for the app. Way too much fun is packed into this little device.

Now, just to note, I can’t connect to the internet while I’m at work, which is just as well because my therapy stuff I can do offline. The iPod Touch can only connect to the web when you have an available wi-fi network to connect to, but iPhones would still be able to connect. I just wasn’t willing to pay the extra money for the 3G network, and I don’t have my cell phone with AT&T anyway. If you must be connected to the web at all times, you might want to spend the extra money for the iPhone. However, its been fine doing therapy without it.

Kristin has recently posted a list of potential apps for the iPad (I started to write this before I knew what Kristin was up to, funny how that works). Most of your iPod touch / iPhone apps will work on the iPad as well, but there are a few greedy programmers that have separate versions which would require you to pay twice if you want it on both devices. Maybe its not greedy. I don't know, but I do love the fact that many apps are for the iPhone and the iPad, meaning you only have to buy it once. I wanted the iPod touch first because I wanted to use it as a personal organizer, something you can keep in your pocket. My pant pockets aren't quite big enough for the iPad. With that being said, I really really really want the iPad now, especially for therapy. It would be much better for those little preschoolers to share (kids tend to gather around, pushing others aside - at least that's what my kids at home do). If you plan on buying on iPad, I suggest that you wait just a little bit.   In about three months they are going to release the 2nd generation iPad. It's rumored that it's going to have a camera, retinal scanning, and be overall a better device. At least that's the going rumor.


If you use a device like this in your therapy, I would like to hear about it. I'm always looking for new and better ways to do therapy, and I'm a little bit of a tech-geek.