Putting the Pieces Together

School was over last Friday. I am proud that I survived--barely. As I wrapped up my year with a flourish of IEP's and Medicaid billing, I also worked at creating and implementing a lesson that I could use as the required demonstration lesson for the Eastern Michigan Writing Project summer institute. With three weeks left in the school year, panic set in. What was I thinking? I was no longer a coach and I wasn't working in classrooms during writing workshop. I talked to a colleague who was more than willing to allow me to visit her class to teach some lessons, but I would have to cancel or reschedule my speech students. I might have been able to justify it if I had speech students in her classroom, but I didn't. For me to cancel students with IEP's to work with other children would be inappropriate and unprofessional. Rescheduling would have been a nightmare. Also, I knew I wanted to use bits and pieces of a previous lesson using "hands" as a topic for writing but my thinking about it was all over the place.  I had to find another way. I decided to teach the lessons to several speech and language impaired students on my caseload.  I'm not sure why I didn't think of it sooner.  The goals of the lesson matched nicely with many of my students' IEP objectives. One of the primary reasons I wanted to be a literacy coach was to assist children with language learning challenges to be successful in their classrooms. I wanted to study the oral language-reading-writing connection in the classroom rather than a therapy room. Now that I am back in speech, I have this opportunity to use my experiences with reading and writing workshops and my passion for literacy and apply that learning to how I provided speech and language therapy. It makes my brain both wired and tired trying to put the pieces together.