I am Ready (kind of)!

This is the start of an exciting year for me.  I went back to work this week in a new county, with four other full-time SLPs at a fabulous elementary school.  We have nine self-contained classrooms!  I know the year ahead is going to be a learning curve for me, but Je Suis Prest!  For you non-Outlander fans, that means “I am ready!” and it will also be my motto for the year (** if you haven’t read the Outlander books or watched the Starz series, get thee to a library/Amazon stat!!).

I have two self-contained autism classrooms, a self-contained pre-K class, and Kindergarten grade level students that I am supporting this year and started to look at my TPT resources to prepare! Here are a few products that I am going to use, to start my year off right:

My active listening interactive book will help us all start off on the right foot, with how to listen from head to toe! This book is also part of a social language interactive book bundle. I’ll add the Biscotti Karate video from Sesame Street to reinforce this important social concept that I am certain to revisit throughout the year!

I am introducing the concepts of emotional regulation, mindfulness and self control with my friends, using this packet!  Another Sesame Street video that aligns perfectly to this concept is this one from Cookie Monster, Me Want It, But Me Wait!

Do you know any “Me Monsters“?  I do and that’s why I wrote this original social skills story and activity packet on thinking about other people.  My students will meet the Me Monsters:  Allaboutme, Gimme, Mefirst and Metoo and help the Me Monsters learn how to think about others at school.  I will add yet another awesome Cookie Monster Sesame Street video on sharing :  Share It Maybe

**I have a Pinterest social skills video board with the Sesame Street videos pinned or you can find them on my social youtube channel too.  Create your own Pinterest boards and add videos that align to the social concepts you are teaching throughout the year, and voila, you will have an easy resource at your fingertips!

Last but not least, this fun little freebie is a great way to get to know your students and for them to get to know each other the first weeks of school!

What are you doing to ready yourself for the school year?  Share any great activities or videos that work for your students here!

A Season for Everything..

I have always loved this passage in the Bible about seasons of change (Ecclesiastes 3). These past few months have brought that into sharp focus for me, both the good and the bad.  My school recently lost our principal, a smart and amazing woman, leaving our community heartbroken.  My youngest son is graduating from high school this month.  I sold my home and am starting a new job next school year.  I really don’t like change at all, but it is part of life.

Many of my students are not fans of change either, but time will still bring these shifts, ready or not. I am reminded in my own season of life of all the lessons I have tried to share with my students:  mindfulness, being flexible, thinking about other people, recognizing all of our feelings instead of pushing those uncomfortable ones away.  The best I can do for them, and for myself, is to try and remain present and calm.  Embracing the feelings that change brings is not only healthy, but crucial in helping us to move forward instead of getting stuck.   Remind yourself to enjoy being in the moment, not wishing time away or worrying about what tomorrow might bring. No one is promised tomorrow.  Tell the people in your life that you love them, be brave and kind, and know the only thing consistent in life is change.

Calm, there’s an app for that!

We had our Best Practices GOSSLP conference for school based SLPs in Georgia last week. It is a conference I look forward to for many reasons, including meeting new friends like the great OTs who created Lucy the Lap Dog , catching up with old speechie friends that I don’t get to see very often and the great speakers the conference brings.   I went to hear Terri Rossman speak on Zones of Regulation, Sarah Ward talk about executive function skills and Julie Weatherly discuss special education law (that will keep you up late at night!!). These courses offered great table discussions during lunch among my fellow SLPs!

One of my takeaways was the seemingly increasing need of our students, particularly the students that I see with social language impairments, for self-regulation and calming strategies.  One of my colleagues in our county is establishing mindfulness classes for both the students and the staff at her middle school!  She has done a lot of training on her own and like me, sees an increase in the stress and anxiety levels in our students and our peers. I think it’s the teach to the mandated test culture, social media pressure and the message to “do more/be more” that we are inundated with in our world today. I feel it as an adult, do you?

So with this in mind, I stumbled across an app called Calm (it’s available on iPhone and Android).  While the app is free, there are paid options within the app that you can choose as well.  Some of the free features include a visual breathing circle, seven days of calm meditation program, soothing visuals and sounds of nature,  and sleep stories for bedtime (for adults and children) that are read in a calm voice.  The app is easy to navigate and has good explanations of each feature. It is packed full of great options that are useful in a variety of settings, to help provide an external cue for self calming.

I had the opportunity to try the app with one of my little after-school friends. He was in the “yellow zone” during our session and was a giggly, wiggly mess last week!  We have been working on whole body listening but those cues and visuals were not enough. So, I popped up the app on my phone, showed him the breathing circle and we did this together for a few minutes.  He did calm down enough to attend to our activities and regulate back to the green zone for a little while before we needed to get up and MOVE to get the wiggles out. There isn’t a one size fits all therapy tool that works all the time with all of my kids, but this app is a nice addition to my skill set.  I may just use it myself the next time I am stuck in two hours of Atlanta gridlock!

What other apps do you use to target calming, reducing anxiety or self-regulation skills? Share here!

Mindfulness with a scoop of pink oatmeal.

I love to stumble across different social language tools to use and I found this  great blog post by Maura Fox, SLP, that outlines beautifully why mindfulness aligns so well with Social Thinking concepts.  I then happened upon the TPT store, Pink Oatmeal, last week while I was looking for preschool yoga visuals, for a presentation. Beyond my intense curiosity over the name of the store, I was impressed with the variety of thematic yoga and brain break cards for littles that this school based Physical Therapist has created. Her Halloween themed yoga product below is an example and is too cute for words!

One thing leads to another when you are researching, so down the rabbit hole I went finding even more ideas after reading these posts on Edutopia.  The concept of  teaching mindfulness and breathing aligns beautifully with the Zones of Regulation .  I know I benefit from just slowing down and taking a deep breath throughout my day.  Our kids are under a lot of stress, and anxiety has skyrocketed in the past ten years in schools. Why not look at a tool that everyone can use to help with emotional regulation throughout our day?

The school based PT behind Pink Oatmeal, Chanda, also has a Youtube Channel and fun blog that shares tons of great ideas on how to build these skills with young learners!  In my preschool professional learning day presentation, we talked a lot about teaching our students breathing techniques to help calm themselves.  I love this video from Sesame Street that teaches kids how to belly breathe through a sweet song! Feel free to look through my playlist of  sounds of nature videos  to work on calming down, breathing and even visualizing all the things we can hear. I am using these in my Sunday school special needs class, to help calm my kids as they come into the room.

School also requires our kids to sit and listen for extended lengths of time, but little bodies are wired to move!  Mindfulness and movement both have foundations in teaching the language of emotion and listening skills.  Joint attention, whole body listening and developing an internal voice versus narrating everything we are thinking about out loud, are skills embedded in these techniques. Cosmic Kids Yoga is another free Youtube channel that offers fun, thematic yoga activities for little people.  They have movie themes, animal adventures and even a video with a puppy explaining what the concept of mindfulness is all about.

I know this may feel a bit “woo-woo” to you, but just consider this a minute.  Mindfulness is easy to embed in your morning circle or starting time (or end of the day) and is a research based methodology to address attention, emotional regulation, calming and compassion.  Our schools are using PBIS to address behavioral expectations and mindfulness is a tool that address all of these skills.  Being able to learn techniques to calm our minds and bodies, focus and develop empathy towards others sounds like a win to me, so take a deep, calming breath and let’s give it a go!

Do you use mindfulness or yoga with your students?  If not, what are your concerns? Share here!