Not So Spooky Spider Craft

 I just love this time of year. The weather cools down and the holidays are right around the corner. Since I work at a private school, we don't go all out for Halloween. However, this is the time of year that I love teaching about creepy crawly critters....especially spiders! 

This was a really fun project to make with the class. It was fairly simple to make and used supplies that I already had in my classroom. To get started, I took a piece of card stock paper and a bottle of glue (don't use a glue stick) I drew out a spiderweb with the glue on the paper. A white crayon works too, but the glue method  turns out so much better. It also gives the web a 3-d texture! I did this during the kids rest time and let it dry overnight to avoid little fingers touching the wet glue!

The next day, I had the kids paint their spiderwebs with watercolors! The glue will resist the watercolor so it creates a very cool design and leaves you with a beautiful spiderweb!

Next, I cut out black circles and 8 spider legs for each student. I used a 2 inch circle hole punch to make the spider body. Before the kids added their spider to the web, we watched a fun video on spiders by SciShow Kids. If you haven't checked this YouTube channel out yet, I recommend it! During the video we learned that spiders have 8 legs but can have lots of eyes! This way they knew how many legs to give their spiders, but I let them decide how many eyes to give their own spider. Googly eyes would work great, but I used sticker eyes I bought on Amazon. 

These spiders turned out so cute and are perfect hallway art. 

Teaching Life Skills

I was having a conversation with a co-worker the other day and we got on the subject of life skills. I absolutely love working on life skills in therapy. Don't get me wrong, playing games and and reading stories are my jam, but there's just something about life skills that brings me joy. 

 When I was working at the therapy clinic, we started a cart service. We stocked the cart full of snacks and let the kids go around and take orders and deliver treats to the other therapists. They got such a kick out of it but little did they know they were working on so many important skills!

Social skills. 

Greetings. 

Conversations.

Topic maintence.

Asking questions. 

Memory.

... just to name a few. 

And all of these things while using their good speech sounds!

I created a cart inventory chart by just snagging images off google that matched what we had in stock. This allowed the kids to take multiple orders and learn how to do inventory. Taking orders and recording inventory was a great skill to teach the kids that were getting closer to the age of applying for a job! Most of my students were younger, but you could also have students apply for this position and get practice making a resumé and interviewing for a job. 

I'm Teaching PreK!

 I cannot believe it's been over a year since I have been able to sit down and write a blog post. Although, I shouldn't be surprised, it's been a whirlwind! This past year has been full of many new adventures, but the biggest one is that I joined a local private school and started teaching PreK. I have learned so much over the past year and I am excited to share our preschool adventures here with you here. 

After I announced on social media that I was going into the classroom full time, I had lots of people reach out asking why I decided to leave the SLP field. It was no surprise to many since lots of the forums and articles are full of therapists expressing their burnout, stress levels, and car crying sessions. But I didn't completely leave the field. I still see a few clients privately and the principal at school asked me to evaluate potential new students when they come to apply to our school.

But the main reason I made the change to teaching full time was for my kids. My daughter is about to enter middle school... which scares the daylights out of me. I personally did not enjoy the majority of my middle school experience and if I had a car at that time, would have cried in it almost every day. The school I am teaching at was Kenzie's preschool. I have kept in touch with a lot of the staff and parents and felt that it was a great, small, loving school for her to return to. When I had Kenzie there shadowing and applying, the school offered me a job. Turning down an offer to work with my favorite age group, have health benefits for my family, and tuition benefits would be crazy. As hard as it was to walk away from some students I had been working with for over 10 years, I couldn't say no. 

So here we are. About to start my second year teaching with both of my kids at school with me. I am currently seeing a few kids for speech this summer which I am really enjoying. I still get my summers off, but get back to my first love a few hours a week!