Be an Organized SLP: Successfully Starting Off the School Year

We love starting off the school year ready to start planning and collaborating on new ideas for our students. However, we are quickly overwhelmed by all that needs to get done once we are swimming in paperwork. We’ve found that preparing ahead of time and taking the time to organize ourselves in the beginning of the year helps set us up for success for the rest of the school year. We’ve compiled a list of things that makes our lives easier as SLPs. We hope that some of these tips make your lives easier, too!

Make your copies at the end of the year!

We make many of our copies (especially our beginning of the year paperwork) in June. At our high school, our students are testing and teachers are done teaching. Therefore, the copy room is all ours in June and we get our copies back immediately. We file them away for easy access in September! One less thing to worry about!

Beginning of the year paperwork

Now that our copies are already made, we can start handing them out. We use the same paperwork each year, but just change the school year date. Our paperwork includes:

Introduction letter to parents– We send home a letter to parents introducing ourselves and making them aware of their child’s speech and language schedule. We used to hand write all of our students addresses on envelopes which was so time consuming. Now we print out address labels and just add our new students each year.
Introduction letter to teachers– We put a letter in every teacher’s mailbox. This letter introduces ourselves and lets the teachers know how we can support students in their classrooms. You’d be surprised how many teachers in our high schools have no idea what we actually do!
Letter to excuse students from class- If we need to take a student out of class, we have a letter for the teacher informing them of the student’s mandated service schedule.
Communication Log– All new students and incoming freshmen fill out a communication log. We can find all of their information on the computer; however, sometimes the students provide us with a little bit more information that is helpful when contacting parents/guardians. Any type of communication made about the student is documented on the communication log.
Passes– We create passes and have them cut up and ready to go.
- Late to Class Pass– All of our information is already on the pass, so all we need to fill in is the date, time and student name if a students needs a late pass from our room.
- Reminder Pass– Some students have a difficult time remembering to come to their sessions so we have students help us deliver passes to students’ classes. Again, all our information is on the pass, and we just need to fill in student name and period they need to come for speech.

Lists, lists, and lists!

We love making lists of our students and what needs to be completed. It’s such a rewarding feeling when you put that check mark in the box showing that a task is complete. We create a list of all of our students in excel and generate multiple lists from the original including lists for beginning of the year paperwork, completion of assignments, progress marks, and so much more. We also have lists that are a quick reference of our students profile. This includes students name, ID #, guidance counselor, speech mandate, other related services, annual/triennial date, and any other important information. Having these lists created at the beginning of the year makes us feel so much more organized as the year progresses.

All in one spot

We used to have lists all over the place but now they are all in one spot: our handy dandy Planner. We couldn’t find the perfect planner to meet our needs, so we created our very own planner that is customized to what works for us. It was created in PowerPoint and includes monthly and weekly calendars, weekly and monthly to do lists, checklists, IEP meeting dates, important dates, and our personalized student lists. We had the planner printed and bound at Staples and use it for everything!

Staying ahead of the game for IEP meetings

In our district, our IEP meetings are scheduled throughout the year; however, sometimes the IEP coordinators do not tell us about an IEP meeting until the day before. To avoid this, we create a list at the beginning of the year of our students’ anticipated IEP meeting dates. A month before their meeting date, we begin gathering information to help write their IEP. Students fill in a speech and language interview, we send out teacher interviews to see how the student is performing in the classroom, and if necessary, we’ll do a classroom observation. Planning ahead of time gives everyone enough time to complete their assigned task. All of this information facilitates the IEP writing process and prepares us for an upcoming meeting, instead of scrambling at the last minute and being unprepared.

Improving attendance: make it a routine

Unlike in the lower grades, in high school, it is up to the students to independently come to their scheduled speech and language session. We are not responsible for picking up our students from class because they are all over the place! Unfortunately, this means that sometimes students opt to skip speech or forget to come. Having an action plan to track down those missing students improves attendance in the long run.

Daily: We send out a reminder to our students who forget to come to speech and language. Every day they are sent a reminder message that is either a paper pass or by using the Remind App (the Remind App is a *free* school-based text messaging system that makes communication between students and teachers easy and acceptable!)
Weekly: If a student misses their scheduled speech and language session, we call them down to the speech room at the end of the week to discuss make up sessions. We also will make a phone call home.
Monthly: If a student continues to miss their speech and language sessions, a letter is sent home at the end of the month.

Easy access to supplies

We use to have our supplies thrown in a closet and we were never able to find anything. Since then, we have organized and stocked up on supplies to have readily available for us. We bought plastic containers from the Dollar Tree and labeled each container with our Cricut Machine. Highlighters, pencils, pens, post-it notes, index cards, binder rings, staples, paperclips, even a box for miscellaneous odds and ends. We also love using our laminator. Laminating our resources and materials allows us to protect and reuse them year after year. Students love using dry erase markers on laminated worksheets and activities.

Organization on the go

When providing services in the classroom away from our fully-stocked therapy room, it’s important to make sure we are prepared for anything. We use the Everything Mary Deluxe Store and Tote to store all of our supplies and everything we may possibly need for our in-class service. We stock up on pens, pencils, scissors, staplers, colored pens, highlighters, tape, glue sticks, erasers, hole puncher, dry erase markers, visuals, index cards, chalk, paperclips, tissue packets, and of course, anti-bacterial hand sanitizer! We also love using binder rings to carry around our ‘Put a Ring on It’ series, perfect for the on-the-go SLP. This is one way to bring our strategies into the classroom setting for those in-classroom services.

We hope that some of our organization ideas are helpful when planning and preparing for the new school year. We have found that we are less overwhelmed and have more time to focus on our lesson planning, creating materials and packets, and most importantly, servicing our students.

Stay tuned for how to stay organized when it comes to lesson planning!