So, I know that I have been absent a lot lately.  Honestly, life has just overwhelmed me.  2015 was a BIG year! At home, my husband and I decided to move our family to a different town.  This meant cleaning, organizing and packing up our old house to sell (it sold in three days) so that we could start looking for a new house.  We didn't expect our house to sell so fast, so it was crunch time really quickly!  We really wanted to find a house in a neighborhood with lots of kids.  We looked all around, and found our dream house in the perfect neighborhood!  We were able to get a little more house than we originally wanted because we moved out a little farther that we had previously thought we would.  This neighborhood is crawling with little buddies for our guys, so it is perfect for us! We accepted the offer on our old house on June 5, and a whirlwind later, we purchased and moved into our new house on August 1!   Did I mention that we had also planned a family vacatio...

There have been many moments in my career as an SLP that have rendered me entirely speechless.  When I saw this topic from Activity Tailor , I knew I had to link up! Working in self-contained Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) classrooms for over 12 years now has produced many speechless moments for me.  My favorites are when students who were previously non-verbal or very late talkers communicate with me. When a student uses every color on their PECS book to request every color Skittle I have. When a student with ASD has been working on simple conversations for a long time, and spontaneously makes a comment without prompting. When we figure out that a completely "non-verbal" student will speak and repeat words into a microphone! When a parent cries at an IEP because they are so happy with the progress their child has made. When a student with ASD moves away for a year and a half, comes back, and still remembers my iPad password!!! There are many speechless moments ...

This week, The Frenzied SLPs are Thankful and Grateful for everyone who follows us and reads our frenzied posts.  To thank everyone for their support, we are having a blog hop giveaway!!!  We are giving away three sets of gift cards.  Three lucky winners will each receive two separate gift cards!  Each winner will get a $10 gift card from Starbucks (who can't use a little pick-me-up?) and a $10 gift card from Teachers Pay Teachers! To win these great prizes, all you have to do is follow our blog hop and collect the letters on the turkey signs to make a secret phrase. You can start with this letter here: This is the first letter in the phrase.  Hop through all the blogs to gather the letters for the secret phrase, and then enter that phrase into the Rafflecopter giveaway that you can find at the bottom of this post.  You can find the next blog at the bottom of this page. I want everyone to know how thankful I am to you for following me here.  When I started th...

One of my very first items on Teachers Pay Teachers was my Category Sorting activity.  So many of you have purchased and used this product, and for that, I am so grateful!  Over the years, I have changed this product a bit for use in my speech room, and thought I would share my changes with you. The first change I made is that I added three additional pictures for each board.  With 10 boards, that is a total of 60 different item cards now!  Categories include: farm animals, zoo animals, fruits, vegetables, letters, shapes, numbers, colors, toys, and vehicles. There are cards that are color coded to go with the boards: And there are cards that have a black outline on the icons for less visual support: Here is what these look like after they are put together: For this update, I also added a visual sentence support.  Many of my students need support in creating sentences to state the category of items.  I created a board that can be used with any of the i...

This month, for The Frenzied SLPs linky, we are focusing on fun, fall-themed articulation ideas. I love fall for so many reasons!  I'm looking outside right now at a crisp, bright blue sky highlighted by trees that are just starting to show their fall colors.  On this beautiful day, we are heading down to the pumpkin patch to pick out our pumpkins.  The colors to me are what makes fall so amazing.  I love the area that I live, just for the change of seasons! My students love fall colors too!  In fact, they just love to color!  I made a Fall No-Prep Articulation packet to entice them to practice at home and with me. These are fun, quick, and simple sheets that encourage practice of any articulation target.  There are pages for sounds in isolation, syllables, words, sentences, and a carryover page for discussion. I also included some extra sheets with ideas for words for each sound you may be targeting.  These are nice to send home so that parents c...

Are you looking for a quick, fun way of targeting following 1,2, and 3-step directions?  Then I have an app for you!   Funny Directions by Speecharoo is a great new app that targets one, two, and three-step directions in four different scenes. These directions are so fun to follow!  There are four different fun scenes to choose from: Beach, Park, Classroom, and Bedroom.  Each scene has a choice of 1, 2, or 3-step directions. Some examples of directions are: 1)Tickle the bird, 2) pick up the hat and set it on the duck, 3) get the spider, set it on the bone, and offer it to the dog. Something silly happens after the direction is followed correctly! When ten items are completed correctly, students are directed to a reinforcing page where they can pop balloons that float out of the kangaroo's pouch. My students were totally engaged by this app!  They loved all of the silly things that happen after a correct answer.  This is a great app when you need a little som...

This year, my school wide theme is superheroes!  I love the theme, as I feel we all have superpowers within ourselves. I have a large bulletin board outside my room that I love to decorate once or twice a year.  Sometimes I will put projects that my students have worked on, but sometimes I just pick something that goes with our theme and kind of stick to that for the year.  This year I had a vision of a city skyline with superheroes flying around.  I started with my basic blue background (fabric that I put on the board three years ago and still looks great).  Then, I took a large piece of black paper from the bulletin board paper roll.  I freestyle cut out the city buildings in one large piece (really not that hard-I promise).  I put that up on the board, and then I had to cut out all of the tiny yellow windows.  I asked the kindergarten teacher across the hall from me to please remind me next time I had an idea like this that cutting out hundreds of tiny pieces of paper is not fu...

I have talked to you before about my super high low tech way of keeping data, but I wanted to show you again for this linky full of great ideas for how to collect your data.  Plus, I added a freebie! My way of keeping data is super simple.  I just have a manilla file folder for each student that I keep in a drawer with green hanging files for each day.  I write the name of the student and the days of the week that they attend sessions on the tab.  Then, I put a copy of their goals on the left side of the file folder and keep a data sheet open on the other side.  I also put any worksheets, notes from parents, or other items in the folder for daily use. At the end of the year, I take out the data sheets and any other items that need to be saved and place them in the students' main file. As for my actual data collection, I use a sheet that simply has 9 boxes and allows me to write the date, and circle whether it was an individual session or group session.  I also incl...

The Best Thing I Learned This Summer.  What a question!  When I first heard it, my initial response was that this summer I learned that I eat too much, drink too much (at least that is what my waistline is telling me), and buying and selling a house is very stressful!  I think I have learned all of those things, but I have also learned some better things this summer too.  Here are three things I learned this summer... First, I really love Michigan!  Sometimes in winter, I am really not sure why I live where I do, but then summer hits.  This summer, my family took a vacation to the Traverse City area where we rented a cottage on the water.  It was amazing!  It was so relaxing with lots of time for some family bonding!  Here is a picture of the view from Sleeping Bear Dunes: The second thing I learned this summer was how to use Periscope!  What a fun, new social media app that is available on both Apple and Android phones.  It is a live streaming app that is owned by Twitter.  ...

One of the great things about purchasing items on Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT) is that when authors update their work (which I often do) you can easily get these updates by following these simple steps: 1.  Go to My TpT and click on My Purchases. 2.  Next, sort your purchases by changing the sort to Recently Revised .  Then, look for products with the red Newly Revised Re-Download button. 3.  Then, you can click on the Description of Revision button to see what has changed. 4.  Last, simply click the Download Now button to get the most updated version of the product. Pretty easy, right? There are a few reasons that I might update a product:  I may have missed something when I proofread the original product, and had to make some fixes or changes for that reason. Oops!  Sorry about that one! I may have looked at the original product and realized that I don't really like how it looks anymore.  In creating new products, I have changed my style over the ...

Hi everyone!  Hope your summer is going well.  I am having a blast staying at home this summer with my boys.  I am also in the midst of moving too.  We purchased a new house, and are moving this month.  It has been a crazy time, but we are all excited. I can't believe it, but fall will be coming before we know it!  I know, how dare I say that!?  But, in my free time between packing and just generally relaxing, I created the last in my series of seasonal interactive books.  My newest addition is for, you guessed it, FALL ! I think these Fall Interactive Books turned out really cute.  I can't wait to use them with my students!  They have been kid tested though, by my very own little monkeys. :) There are three books in this set: Fall Activities Fall Clothes What Do You See? Each of these books has ten pages with an interactive piece for each page.  Your students will be quickly engaged with these repetitive sentences in each book.  There are detailed instructions f...