New Year’s Resolutions

Happy New Year everyone!  Hope you had a lovely break over Christmas and the New Year!

New Year is a time for making resolutions about what you want to change over the next year.  I have to say that, like many people, I’m not too good at sticking to resolutions and I usually find they have fallen by the wayside by about January 10^th.  Last year I was going to keep the flat tidy… I think anyone who has been to our flat could confirm that I didn’t stick to that one!

However, Natalie Snyders is hosting a linky for SLP/SLT bloggers on New Year’s Resolutions and we thought it would be interesting to join in with things we’d like to do this year.  Here are our ideas:-

I should:-

• Remember not to give the child who hates stickers a sticker at the end of the session. Also, I want to remember not to blow bubbles with the child who hates bubbles and not to give my wooden toy fishing rod to the child who always waves it around dangerously and ends up hitting me on the head with it!  This might mean I have less bumps on my head for a start!

• Remember to take a) phone numbers and b) a map with me everywhere. As a travelling therapist, I usually manage to be on time for my appointments.  However, it always seems to be that the one day I get stuck at roadworks is the day that I have forgotten to bring the relevant phone number with me to enable me to let people know that I’m running late!…  (Of course, even this won’t help me if I’m in one of the many phone network black spots that there are around here – my own house seems suddenly to be in one!)  Also, on a few occasions my satnav has inexplicably refused to function and I got lost – I realised that since having my satnav I’m not good at making sure I always have a map with me and drove around aimlessly trying to work out where I was supposed to be.  (If you read this post, you’ll know that directions are not my strong point!…)

• Clear out my car more often so that I’m not scrabbling around in the boot minutes before my appointment is due to start looking for the game or activity I had planned to do and know is in there somewhere!

• Write down ideas when I think of them. This one is really annoying!  Elizabeth and I frequently talk about ideas for the blog.  We come up with some great stuff, if I say so myself!  Very often we verbally plan who will write about what for the next few weeks and talk through the content of the posts together.  Unfortunately I don’t then remember it when I come to sit and write the post!  Equally, I often have my best ideas about therapy while I am driving away from an appointment, reflecting on how things went and what I could do differently next time.  It would be unwise to write it down at the exact moment I thought of it, as I’m often driving, but I really must remember to take a moment before dashing in to the next appointment to write down my brilliant idea!  I would save myself many hours of racking my brains the evening before the next appointment, trying to remember what I was going to do!…

• Find some more new and interesting games (and stop leaving my best games in a school, where they invariably get assimilated into the school’s resources and never seen by me again!) The kids are usually happy with my games long after I get bored with them, but I need to be engaged too for the therapy to be the best that it could be!

• Actually write and upload some of the many handouts and resources that we have earmarked to make and put on the blog!

What are your resolutions for speech and language therapy this year?  You can read other people’s on Natalie Snyders’ linky post here.