A Day in the Life of a School SLP

I often see these fun posts about 'a day in the life of....' and I thought one about my job would be fun. So, here's how a typical day as Sarah, the school speech language pathologist goes:

6:45am- alarm goes off
get up, walk treadmill if no early meetings at school (which is at least 1x a week)
if meeting at school- skip treadmill and get to school by 8:10am
8:30am- time I have to be at school by (I'm usually there before then)

get coffee, make copies, set up my room.
9:00am- 10:30am- see 3 groups (3-4 kids) for 20 minutes each
10:30-11am- run over to the main building, make copies, etc.
11am-noon- 2 more therapy groups
noon-1pm- lunch and recess/lunch duty on Tues and Wed
1-2pm- 2 more therapy groups
2-2:30pm- plan, run to main building, make copies, write IEP's, etc.
2:30-3:25pm- last 2 therapy groups
3:25pm- last group leaves my room- hurry & try to get as much paperwork done before 4pm!

4pm- head home

I don't see any kiddos at the elementary school on Fridays. The whole day is reserved for meetings and paperwork and I usually see my North I-High kiddos. (unless I feel like a real go-getter and get everything done at North on Thursday!)

Usually I have to spend 2 days a week over at North, so I have Thursday and Friday blocked off for that. The I-High starts at 7:55am so I usually get there by 8am, making for a very long day.

So, that's my typical day as a Speech Path. Even though the schedule is crazy and the paperwork is overwhelming, I love it. Every 20 minutes I work with a new bunch of kiddos and we get to tackle a new problem. It's never the same from group to group, day to day, child to child.

I really get to know each kid and hear about their life, even though I have over 50 on my caseload. It's the only job I know of that you get paid to play games all day, pass out candy/ stickers for correct R or S production and get a fall break, 2 week Christmas break and summers off!

(here's my classroom, all put together- you can't see the rug, but the kiddos pull that basket out and play with the blocks and we play games on it sometimes)