SLP Fabulousness: You Ought To Know...... Back To School!

Hey Everybody!! Today I am linking up with Mrs. McClain, a fabulous first grade teacher, over at Buzzing with Mrs. McClain for her monthly You Oughta Know blog hop. Other bloggers and I will be sharing things that you “oughta know” for your classroom. Today I will be sharing some ideas to help you sail through this school year!

You oughta know…… (For special and regular education teachers)

Great beginning of the year planning strategies!

This is my Lucky 13^th year as a Speech Language Pathologist, and I have learned some things along the way! The one thing that I feel is most important is PLANNING! If you are a special education teacher you can understand that we are haunted by dates and paperwork!! So a great way to keep up with them is to tackle them head on and use resources that will help limit some of the time it takes to complete paperwork.

When I first started in the school system I was all over the place! And I would often almost fall out of compliance when it came to completing IEP’s. Until I started doing something really simple!! I started tracking IEP’s at the beginning of the school year!

I use a form to keep track of all students’ IEP and evaluation dates. Another helpful thing is also keeping track of when you should be sending the IEP notification letters home. In my school district we are required to make contact with the parents two weeks prior to the meeting date. Now I do mine by the month….. have a form for each month.

This will also help you do things at your speed! If you are the related service provider you can also go in and complete your section of the IEP. This will help because you will not be so dependent on the primary service provider to let you know when something is due… which is always tomorrow!! J

Regular education teachers I haven’t forgot about you!! There’s something you oughta know too!

As a special education provider, I look to keep regular education teacher in the know!! Classroom teachers need to be aware of any type of modification/ accommodations or medications that is on a students’ IEP. Once an accommodation is checked off on a student’s IEP, the classroom teacher is required to implement them in the general classroom setting. However, it can get awfully confusing when there is more than on special education student in your class… A perfect and easy solution to this problem is to use an “IEP At Glance” form.

These forms generally pull out the generally information you as a regular education teacher need to know. You can place this in your teacher binder and have for easy access just in case you need to provide any information. This Form can be found at my TPT store for free!

I know these planning strategies are simple but they are very valuable! Use these and your fellow teachers will look at you and say… “Hey that teacher got it together!!” LOL

I just could not end this post without telling you about a super great app that falls in line with planning and keeping organized!

I LOVE this app sooo much! File manger pro download, organize and view all of your files on your iPhone or iPad. Its like Windows Explorer on your PC or the Finder on your Mac.