I’m trying to be more aware of how I’m making progress as an SLP, and even in life. You know, when you have those lightbulb moments, or when you think, I need to remember this! So here are some things lately I’ve been taking note of!
When I’m trying to learn something new, I need to account for the learning time
I’m great at dreaming up long-term goals or outcomes, but sometimes need to spend more time figuring out how to get there. One of my new hobbies is dabbling around with Illustrator. But I realized I was getting frustrated when I wasn’t meeting my goal of “make this using Illustrator by this date“, because it was taking me longer to learn all the tools of Illustrator than I accounted for. My new goal became “play around on Illustrator 30 minutes a day”. I got excited to follow tutorials and explore on my own, but didn’t feel pressure by the end of that time if I hadn’t “produced” anything. Even over the course of a week, I felt like I had made more progress than when I was initially just focused on the outcome.
Wordless picture books are amazing
I talked about this on Instagram, but I used Journey, by Aaron Becker with my students a couple weeks ago and LOVED it. There are endless language goal possibilities when using picture books without words–creating sentences, creating rich sentences, predicting, inferencing, story retelling, asking questions, and on and on! I had out my do-it-yourself EET visuals to help expand our utterances into really descriptive sentences. Questions like, what do you think the castle is made of? or what do you do with a magic carpet? helped add more detail to our sentences. I also think books are great for articulation. I either point to pictures containing a student’s target sound, or make up a sentence about one of the pictures and add in the target sound if there’s not a good depiction of it.
It’s ok to read for fun during nap time
I love reading. At this season of my life, it cannot be my highest priority, but this past year I was able to read more than I have in recent years (made possible by cutting out someNetflix and social media, if you can imagine that ;), and I’m trying to keep it up. As a mama of a little one, nap time is GOLDEN. Nap time means some serious hustle better be happening, whether it’s doing things around the house, catching up on work, or doing some TpT things. But the other day, I felt like reading. House things and work got put on the back burner in the name of a little #selfcare. And it was a delight. I can’t do this all the time, but occasionally, I will treat myself to it without feeling even a little guilty!
Feel free to share something you’ve been learning–from trivial to life-changing! It’s my goal to document my own quarterly. I think it’ll be fun to look back on!
YES to reading during nap time. I don’t do this often enough! I always feel guilty.
Things I’m learning during this season:
1. My house will never be fully clean, so why waste today worrying about it?
2. Candles actually help me relax and de-stress during the day, as crazy as it sounds. Light more candles.
3. I thrive by having my goals and “to-do’s” written out so that I can stop my brain from going a million directions (otherwise, I never actually settle on a plan of attack). I’m learning to carve out some time because this step is so important and I get more done if I spend the 30 minutes writing it all out.